Quenching of combustion by shear flows

We consider a simple model describing premixed combustion in the presence of fluid flow: reaction diffusion equation with passive advection and ignition type nonlinearity. Strong advection can suppress flames - a process we call quenching. A flow is called quenching if any compactly supported initial data will become extinct provided that the amplitude of the flow is chosen sufficiently large. In this paper, we provide a sharp characterization of quenching shear flows.The efficiency of quenching depends strongly on the geometry and scaling of the flow. We discuss the cases of slowly and quickly varying flows, proving analytically behavior that has been observed earlier in numerical experiments. The technique involves probabilistic and PDE estimates, in particular applications of Malliavin calculus and central limit theorem for martingales.