Negligibility of haptotaxis effect in a chemotaxis–haptotaxis model

Abstract

In this work, we rigorously study chemotaxis effect versus haptotaxis effect on boundedness, blow-up and asymptotical behavior of solutions for a combined chemotaxis-haptotaxis model in 2D settings. It is well-known that the corresponding Keller-Segel chemotaxis-only model possesses a striking feature of critical mass blow-up phenomenon, namely, subcritical mass ensures boundedness, whereas, supercritical mass induces the existence of blow-ups. Herein, we show that this critical mass blow-up phenomenon stays almost the same in the full chemotaxis-haptotaxis model. For negligibility of haptotaxis on asymptotical behavior, we show that any global-in-time haptotaxis solution component vanishes exponentially as time approaches infinity, and the other two solution components converge exponentially to that of chemotaxis-only model in a global sense for suitably large chemo-sensitivity and in the usual sense for suitably small chemo-sensitivity. Therefore, the aforementioned critical mass blow-up phenomenon for the chemotaxis-only model is almost undestroyed even with arbitrary introduction of haptotaixs, showing negligibility of haptotaxis effect compared to chemotaxis effect in terms of boundedness, blow-up and longtime behavior in the chemotaxis-haptotaxis model.