Growth-fragmentation model for a population presenting heterogeneity in growth rate: Malthus parameter and long-time behavior

The goal of the present paper is to explore the long-time behavior of the growth-fragmentation equation formulated in the case of equal mitosis and variability in growth rate, under fairly general assumptions on the coefficients. The first results concern the monotonicity of the Malthus parameter with respect to the coefficients. Existence of a solution to the associated eigenproblem is then stated in the case of a finite set of growth rates thanks to Kre\u{i}n-Rutman theorem and a series of estimates on moments. Afterwards, adapting the classical general relative entropy (GRE) method enables us to ensure uniqueness of the eigenelements and derive the long-time asymptotics of the Cauchy problem. We prove convergence towards the steady state including in the case of individual exponential growth known to exhibit oscillations at large times in absence of variability. A few numerical simulations are eventually performed in the case of linear growth rate to illustrate our monotonicity results and the fact that variability, providing enough mixing in the heterogeneous population, is sufficient to re-establish asynchronicity.