Analysis of an elliptic–parabolic free boundary problem modelling the growth of non-necrotic tumor cord

We study a free boundary problem modelling the growth of a tumor cord in which tumor cells live around and receive nutrient from a central blood vessel. The evolution of the tumor cord surface is governed by Darcy's law together with a surface tension equation. The concentration of nutrient in the tumor cord satisfies a reaction–diffusion equation. In this paper we first establish a well-posedness result for this free boundary problem in some Sobolev–Besov spaces with low regularity by using the analytic semigroup theory. We next study asymptotic stability of the unique radially symmetric stationary solution. By making delicate spectrum analysis for the linearized problem, we prove that this stationary solution is locally asymptotically stable provided that the constant c representing the ratio between the diffusion time of nutrient and the birth time of new cells is sufficiently small.