Existence and stability of patterns in a reaction-diffusion-ODE system with hysteresis in non-uniform media

This paper is concerned with the existence and stability of steady states of a reaction-diffusion-ODE system arising from the theory of biological pattern formation. We are interested in spontaneous emergence of patterns from spatially heterogeneous environments, hence assume that all coefficients in the equations can depend on the spatial variable. We give some sufficient conditions on the coefficients which guarantee the existence of far-from-the-equilibrium patterns with jump discontinuity and then verify their stability in a weak sense. Our conditions cover the case where the number of equilibria of the kinetic system (i.e., without diffusion) changes from one to three in the spatial interval, which is not obtained by a small perturbation of constant coefficients. Moreover, we consider the asymptotic behavior of steady states as the diffusion coefficient tends to infinity. Some examples and numerical simulations are given to illustrate the theoretical results.