Passing to the limit in a Wasserstein gradient flow : from diffusion to reaction

Abstract

We study a singular-limit problem arising in the modelling of chemical reactions. At finite e>0, the system is described by a Fokker-Planck convection-diffusion equation with a double-well convection potential. This potential is scaled by 1/e, and in the limit eto0, the solution concentrates onto the two wells, resulting into a limiting system that is a pair of ordinary differential equations for the density at the two wells. This convergence has been proved in Peletier, Savaré, and Veneroni, em SIAM Journal on Mathematical Analysis, 42(4):1805--1825, 2010, using the linear structure of the equation. In this paper we re-prove the result by using solely the Wasserstein gradient-flow structure of the system. In particular, we make no use of the linearity, nor of the fact that it is a second-order system. The first key step in this approach is a reformulation of the equation as the minimization of an action functional that captures the propety of being a emphcurve of maximal slope in an integrated form. The second important step is a rescaling of space. Using only the Wasserstein gradient-flow structure, we prove that the sequence of rescaled solutions is pre-compact in an appropriate topology. ...