No Arabic abstract
We consider a Vlasov-Fokker-Planck equation governing the evolution of the density of interacting and diffusive matter in the space of positions and velocities. We use a probabilistic interpretation to obtain convergence towards equilibrium in Wasserstein distance with an explicit exponential rate. We also prove a propagation of chaos property for an associated particle system, and give rates on the approximation of the solution by the particle system. Finally, a transportation inequality for the distribution of the particle system leads to quantitative deviation bounds on the approximation of the equilibrium solution of the equation by an empirical mean of the particles at given time.
In this paper we study second order stochastic differential equations with measurable and density-distribution dependent coefficients. Through establishing a maximum principle for kinetic Fokker-Planck-Kolmogorov equations with distribution-valued inhomogeneous term, we show the existence of weak solutions under mild assumptions. Moreover, by using the Holder regularity estimate obtained recently in cite{GIMV19}, we also show the well-posedness of generalized martingale problems when diffusion coefficients only depend on the position variable (not necessarily continuous). Even in the non density-distribution dependent case, it seems that this is the first result about the well-posedness of SDEs with measurable diffusion coefficients.
We consider classical solutions to the kinetic Fokker-Planck equation on a bounded domain $mathcal O subset~mathbb{R}^d$ in position, and we obtain a probabilistic representation of the solutions using the Langevin diffusion process with absorbing boundary conditions on the boundary of the phase-space cylindrical domain $D = mathcal O times mathbb{R}^d$. Furthermore, a Harnack inequality, as well as a maximum principle, is provided on $D$ for solutions to this kinetic Fokker-Planck equation, together with the existence of a smooth transition density for the associated absorbed Langevin process. This transition density is shown to satisfy an explicit Gaussian upper-bound. Finally, the continuity and positivity of this transition density at the boundary of $D$ is also studied. All these results are in particular crucial to study the behavior of the Langevin diffusion process when it is trapped in a metastable state defined in terms of positions.
In recent work, Chow, Huang, Li and Zhou introduced the study of Fokker-Planck equations for a free energy function defined on a finite graph. When $Nge 2$ is the number of vertices of the graph, they show that the corresponding Fokker-Planck equation is a system of $N$ nonlinear ordinary differential equations defined on a Riemannian manifold of probability distributions. The different choices for inner products on the space of probability distributions result in different Fokker-Planck equations for the same process. Each of these Fokker-Planck equations has a unique global equilibrium, which is a Gibbs distribution. In this paper we study the {em speed of convergence} towards global equilibrium for the solution of these Fokker-Planck equations on a graph, and prove that the convergence is indeed exponential. The rate as measured by the decay of the $L_2$ norm can be bound in terms of the spectral gap of the Laplacian of the graph, and as measured by the decay of (relative) entropy be bound using the modified logarithmic Sobolev constant of the graph. With the convergence result, we also prove two Talagrand-type inequalities relating relative entropy and Wasserstein metric, based on two different metrics introduced in [CHLZ] The first one is a local inequality, while the second is a global inequality with respect to the lower bound metric from [CHLZ].
We derive a diffusion approximation for the kinetic Vlasov-Fokker-Planck equation in bounded spatial domains with specular reflection type boundary conditions. The method of proof involves the construction of a particular class of test functions to be chosen in the weak formulation of the kinetic model. This involves the analysis of the underlying Hamiltonian dynamics of the kinetic equation coupled with the reflection laws at the boundary. This approach only demands the solution family to be weakly compact in some weighted Hilbert space rather than the much tricky $mathrm L^1$ setting.
The algorithm for Dissipative Particle Dynamics (DPD), as modified by Espagnol and Warren, is used as a starting point for proving an H-theorem for the free energy and deriving hydrodynamic equations. Equilibrium and transport properties of the DPD fluid are explicitly calculated in terms of the system parameters for the continuous time version of the model.