No Arabic abstract
We provide a complete and rigorous description of phase transitions for kinetic models of self-propelled particles interacting through alignment. These models exhibit a competition between alignment and noise. Both the alignment frequency and noise intensity depend on a measure of the local alignment. We show that, in the spatially homogeneous case, the phase transition features (number and nature of equilibria, stability, convergence rate, phase diagram, hysteresis) are totally encoded in how the ratio between the alignment and noise intensities depend on the local alignment. In the spatially inhomogeneous case, we derive the macroscopic models associated to the stable equilibria and classify their hyperbolicity according to the same function.
We consider the spatially homogeneous Boltzmann equation for ballistic annihilation in dimension d 2. Such model describes a system of ballistic hard spheres that, at the moment of interaction, either annihilate with probability $alpha$ $in$ (0, 1) or collide elastically with probability 1 -- $alpha$. Such equation is highly dissipative in the sense that all observables, hence solutions, vanish as time progresses. Following a contribution , by two of the authors, considering well posedness of the steady self-similar profile in the regime of small annihilation rate $alpha$ $ll$ 1, we prove here that such self-similar profile is the intermediate asymptotic attractor to the annihilation dynamics with explicit universal algebraic rate. This settles the issue about universality of the annihilation rate for this model brought in the applied literature.
We study the McKean-Vlasov equation [ partial_t varrho= beta^{-1} Delta varrho + kappa abla cdot (varrho abla (W star varrho)) , , ] with periodic boundary conditions on the torus. We first study the global asymptotic stability of the homogeneous steady state. We then focus our attention on the stationary system, and prove the existence of nontrivial solutions branching from the homogeneous steady state, through possibly infinitely many bifurcations, under appropriate assumptions on the interaction potential. We also provide sufficient conditions for the existence of continuous and discontinuous phase transitions. Finally, we showcase these results by applying them to several examples of interaction potentials such as the noisy Kuramoto model for synchronisation, the Keller--Segel model for bacterial chemotaxis, and the noisy Hegselmann--Krausse model for opinion dynamics.
The goal of these lecture notes is to present in a unified way various models for the dynamics of aligning self-propelled rigid bodies at different scales and the links between them. The models and methods are inspired from [12,13], but, in addition, we introduce a new model and apply on it the same methods. While the new model has its own interest, our aim is also to emphasize the methods by demonstrating their adaptability and by presenting them in a unified and simplified way. Furthermore, from the various microscopic models we derive the same macroscopic model, which is a good indicator of its universality.
We present a simple model of alignment of a large number of rigid bodies (modeled by rotation matrices) subject to internal rotational noise. The numerical simulations exhibit a phenomenon of first order phase transition with respect the alignment intensity, with abrupt transition at two thresholds. Below the first threshold, the system is disordered in large time: the rotation matrices are uniformly distributed. Above the second threshold, the long time behaviour of the system is to concentrate around a given rotation matrix. When the intensity is between the two thresholds, both situations may occur. We then study the mean-field limit of this model, as the number of particles tends to infinity, which takes the form of a nonlinear Fokker--Planck equation. We describe the complete classification of the steady states of this equation, which fits with numerical experiments. This classification was obtained in a previous work by Degond, Diez, Merino-Aceituno and the author, thanks to the link between this model and a four-dimensional generalization of the Doi--Onsager equation for suspensions of rodlike polymers interacting through Maier--Saupe potential. This previous study concerned a similar equation of BGK type for which the steady-states were the same. We take advantage of the stability results obtained in this framework, and are able to prove the exponential stability of two families of steady-states: the disordered uniform distribution when the intensity of alignment is less than the second threshold, and a family of non-isotropic steady states (one for each possible rotation matrix, concentrated around it), when the intensity is greater than the first threshold. We also show that the other families of steady-states are unstable, in agreement with the numerical observations.
In this article we investigate the phase transition phenomena that occur in a model of self-organisation through body-attitude coordination. Here, the body-attitude of an agent is modelled by a rotation matrix in $mathbb{R}^3$ as in [Degond, Frouvelle, Merino-Aceituno, 2017]. The starting point of this study is a BGK equation modelling the evolution of the distribution function of the system at a kinetic level. The main novelty of this work is to show that in the spatially homogeneous case, self-organisation may appear or not depending on the local density of agents involved. We first exhibit a connection between body-orientation models and models of nematic alignment of polymers in higher dimensional space from which we deduce the complete description of the possible equilibria Then, thanks to a gradient-flow structure specific to this BGK model, we are able to prove the stability and the convergence towards the equilibria in the different regimes. We then derive the macroscopic models associated to the stable equilibria in the spirit of [Degond, Frouvelle, Merino-Aceituno, 2017] and [Degond, Frouvelle, Liu, 2015].