Formation of clusters and coarsening in weakly interacting diffusions

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Gerber, Nicolai, Gvalani, Rishabh S., Hairer, Martin, Pavliotis, Grigorios A., Schlichting, André
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910055654227968
author Gerber, Nicolai
Gvalani, Rishabh S.
Hairer, Martin
Pavliotis, Grigorios A.
Schlichting, André
author_facet Gerber, Nicolai
Gvalani, Rishabh S.
Hairer, Martin
Pavliotis, Grigorios A.
Schlichting, André
contents This paper studies the clustering behavior of weakly interacting diffusions under the influence of sufficiently localized attractive interaction potentials on the one-dimensional torus. We describe how this clustering behavior is closely related to the presence of discontinuous phase transitions in the mean-field PDE. For local attractive interactions, we employ a new variant of the strict Riesz rearrangement inequality to prove that all global minimizers of the free energy are either uniform or single-cluster states, in the sense that they are symmetrically decreasing. We analyze different timescales for the particle system and the mean-field (McKean-Vlasov) PDE, arguing that while the particle system can exhibit coarsening by both coalescence and diffusive mass exchange between clusters, the clusters in the mean-field PDE are unable to move and coarsening occurs via the mass exchange of clusters. By introducing a new model for this mass exchange, we argue that the PDE exhibits dynamical metastability. We conclude by presenting careful numerical experiments that demonstrate the validity of our model.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_17629
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Formation of clusters and coarsening in weakly interacting diffusions
Gerber, Nicolai
Gvalani, Rishabh S.
Hairer, Martin
Pavliotis, Grigorios A.
Schlichting, André
Analysis of PDEs
Probability
This paper studies the clustering behavior of weakly interacting diffusions under the influence of sufficiently localized attractive interaction potentials on the one-dimensional torus. We describe how this clustering behavior is closely related to the presence of discontinuous phase transitions in the mean-field PDE. For local attractive interactions, we employ a new variant of the strict Riesz rearrangement inequality to prove that all global minimizers of the free energy are either uniform or single-cluster states, in the sense that they are symmetrically decreasing. We analyze different timescales for the particle system and the mean-field (McKean-Vlasov) PDE, arguing that while the particle system can exhibit coarsening by both coalescence and diffusive mass exchange between clusters, the clusters in the mean-field PDE are unable to move and coarsening occurs via the mass exchange of clusters. By introducing a new model for this mass exchange, we argue that the PDE exhibits dynamical metastability. We conclude by presenting careful numerical experiments that demonstrate the validity of our model.
title Formation of clusters and coarsening in weakly interacting diffusions
topic Analysis of PDEs
Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.17629