No Arabic abstract
The starting point of our analysis is a class of one-dimensional interacting particle systems with two species. The particles are confined to an interval and exert a nonlocal, repelling force on each other, resulting in a nontrivial equilibrium configuration. This class of particle systems covers the setting of pile-ups of dislocation walls, which is an idealised setup for studying the microscopic origin of several dislocation density models in the literature. Such density models are used to construct constitutive relations in plasticity models. Our aim is to pass to the many-particle limit. The main challenge is the combination of the nonlocal nature of the interactions, the singularity of the interaction potential between particles of the same type, the non-convexity of the the interaction potential between particles of the opposite type, and the interplay between the length-scale of the domain with the length-scale $ell_n$ of the decay of the interaction potential. Our main results are the $Gamma$-convergence of the energy of the particle positions, the evolutionary convergence of the related gradient flows for $ell_n$ sufficiently large, and the non-convergence of the gradient flows for $ell_n$ sufficiently small.
We address the question of convergence of evolving interacting particle systems as the number of particles tends to infinity. We consider two types of particles, called positive and negative. Same-sign particles repel each other, and opposite-sign particles attract each other. The interaction potential is the same for all particles, up to the sign, and has a logarithmic singularity at zero. The central example of such systems is that of dislocations in crystals. Because of the singularity in the interaction potential, the discrete evolution leads to blow-up in finite time. We remedy this situation by regularising the interaction potential at a length-scale $delta_n>0$, which converges to zero as the number of particles $n$ tends to infinity. We establish two main results. The first one is an evolutionary convergence result showing that the empirical measures of the positive and of the negative particles converge to a solution of a set of coupled PDEs which describe the evolution of their continuum densities. In the setting of dislocations these PDEs are known as the Groma-Balogh equations. In the proof we rely on the theory of $lambda$-convex gradient flows, a priori estimates for the Groma-Balogh equations and Orlicz spaces. The proof require $delta_n$ to converge to zero sufficiently slowly. The second result is a counterexample, demonstrating that if $delta_n$ converges to zero sufficiently fast, then the limits of the empirical measures of the positive and the negative dislocations do not satisfy the Groma-Balogh equations. These results show how the validity of the Groma-Balogh equations as the limit of many-particle systems depends in a subtle way on the scale at which the singularity of the potential is regularised.
In this paper, we study the mean field limit of interacting particles with memory that are governed by a system of interacting non-Markovian Langevin equations. Under the assumption of quasi-Markovianity (i.e. that the memory in the system can be described using a finite number of auxiliary processes), we pass to the mean field limit to obtain the corresponding McKean-Vlasov equation in an extended phase space. We obtain the fundamental solution (Greens function) for this equation, for the case of a quadratic confining potential and a quadratic (Curie-Weiss) interaction. Furthermore, for nonconvex confining potentials we characterize the stationary state(s) of the McKean-Vlasov equation, and we show that the bifurcation diagram of the stationary problem is independent of the memory in the system. In addition, we show that the McKean-Vlasov equation for the non-Markovian dynamics can be written in the GENERIC formalism and we study convergence to equilibrium and the Markovian asymptotic limit.
We consider a system of two kinetic equations modelling a multicellular system : The first equation governs the dynamics of cells, whereas the second kinetic equation governs the dynamics of the chemoattractant. For this system, we first prove the existence of global-in-time solution. The proof of existence relies on a fixed point procedure after establishing some a priori estimates. Then, we investigate the hyperbolic limit after rescaling of the kinetic system. It leads to a macroscopic system of Cattaneo type. The rigorous derivation is established thanks to a compactness method.
This paper focuses on the connections between four stochastic and deterministic models for the motion of straight screw dislocations. Starting from a description of screw dislocation motion as interacting random walks on a lattice, we prove explicit estimates of the distance between solutions of this model, an SDE system for the dislocation positions, and two deterministic mean-field models describing the dislocation density. The proof of these estimates uses a collection of various techniques in analysis and probability theory, including a novel approach to establish propagation-of-chaos on a spatially discrete model. The estimates are non-asymptotic and explicit in terms of four parameters: the lattice spacing, the number of dislocations, the dislocation core size, and the temperature. This work is a first step in exploring this parameter space with the ultimate aim to connect and quantify the relationships between the many different dislocation models present in the literature.
We perform the discrete-to-continuum limit passage for a microscopic model describing the time evolution of dislocations in a one dimensional setting. This answers the related open question raised by Geers et al. in [GPPS13]. The proof of the upscaling procedure (i.e. the discrete-to-continuum passage) relies on the gradient flow structure of both the discrete and continuous energies of dislocations set in a suitable evolutionary variational inequality framework. Moreover, the convexity and $Gamma$-convergence of the respective energies are properties of paramount importance for our arguments.