Radial symmetry and Liouville theorem for master equations

This paper has two primary objectives. The first one is to demonstrate that the solutions of master equation

$$\begin{aligned} (\partial _t-\Delta )^s u(x,t) =f(u(x, t)), \,\,(x, t)\in B_1(0)\times \mathbb {R}, \end{aligned}$$

subject to the vanishing exterior condition, are radially symmetric and strictly decreasing with respect to the origin in \(B_1(0)\) for any \(t\in \mathbb {R}\). Another one is to establish the Liouville theorem for homogeneous master equation

$$\begin{aligned} (\partial _t-\Delta )^s u(x,t)=0 ,\,\, \text{ in }\,\, \mathbb {R}^n\times \mathbb {R}, \end{aligned}$$

which states that all bounded solutions must be constant. We propose a new methodology for a direct method of moving planes applicable to the fully fractional heat operator \((\partial _t-\Delta )^s\), and the proof of our main results based on this direct method involves the perturbation technique, limit argument as well as Fourier transform. This study opens up a way to investigate the geometric behavior of master equations, and provides valuable insights for establishing qualitative properties of solutions and even for deriving important Liouville theorems for other types of fractional order parabolic equations.