Cahn–Hilliard Models for Glial Cells

Our aim in this paper is to study a Cahn–Hilliard model with a symport term. This equation is proposed to model some energy mechanisms (e.g., lactate) in glial cells. The main difficulty is to prove the existence of a biologically relevant solution. This is achieved by considering a modified equation and taking a logarithmic nonlinear term. A second difficulty is to prove additional regularity on the solutions which is essential to prove a strict separation from the pure states 0 and 1 in one and two space dimensions. We also consider a second model, based on the Cahn–Hilliard–Oono equation.