Avoidance of caldera-type dead cores in a chemotaxis system with degenerate diffusion and compactly supported initial population density

We consider a degenerate chemotaxis system of the form \begin{align}\label{star}\tag{$\star$} \left\lbrace \begin{array}{r@{}l@{\quad}l} &u_t=\nabla\cdot\big(D(u)\nabla u-uS(u)\nabla v\big)+f(u,v),\ &v_t=Δv+g(u,v),\end{array}\right. \end{align} in a bounded domain $\mathrm{\Omega }\subset {\mathbb{R}}^N$ with smooth boundary subjected to no-flux and homogeneous Neumann boundary conditions. Herein, the diffusion coefficient $D\in C^0([0,\mathrm{\infty }))\cap C^1((0,\mathrm{\infty }))$ is assumed to satisfy $D(0)=0$ and $D^{\mathrm{\prime }}(s)\ge 0$ on $(0,\mathrm{\infty })$, and there are $s_0\in (0,1]$ and $d>0$ such that $D(s)\ge d{s}^{m-1}$ on $[0,s_0]$ and that \begin{align*} s D’(s)\leq C_D D(s)\quad$\text{for }$s\in[0,s_0]. \end{align*} The sensitivity function $S\in C^2([0,\mathrm{\infty }))$ and the source term $f\in C^1([0,\mathrm{\infty })\times [0,\mathrm{\infty }))$ in the first equation are supposed to be nonnegative. The source term $g\in C^1([0,\mathrm{\infty })\times [0,\mathrm{\infty }))$ of the second equation can in fact be negative. Prototypical choices for $g$ are $g(u,v)=-uv$ and $g(u,v)=-v+u$. We show under suitable assumptions on weak solutions to \eqref{star} on $\mathrm{\Omega }\times (0,T_0)$, that whenever the smoothly bounded domain $\omega \subset {\mathbb{R}}^N$ and $T\in (0,T_0)$ are such that \begin{align*} \overlineω\subseteq Ω,\qquad u_0>0\ $\text{ in }$\ \overlineω,\qquad$\text{ and }$\qquad u>0\ $\text{ on }$\ \partialω\times(0,T), \end{align*} then \begin{align*} u>0\quad$\text{in }$\ \overlineω\times[0,T). \end{align*} In particular, any dead cores that appear during the evolution must have developed from regions that were already part of the initial zero set.