2020, Maas, Jan, Mielke, Alexander

We consider various modeling levels for spatially homogeneous chemical reaction systems, namely the chemical master equation, the chemical Langevin dynamics, and the reaction-rate equation. Throughout we restrict our study to the case where the microscopic system satisfies the detailed-balance condition. The latter allows us to enrich the systems with a gradient structure, i.e. the evolution is given by a gradient-flow equation. We present the arising links between the associated gradient structures that are driven by the relative entropy of the detailed-balance steady state. The limit of large volumes is studied in the sense of evolutionary Γ-convergence of gradient flows. Moreover, we use the gradient structures to derive hybrid models for coupling different modeling levels.

2021, Mielke, Alexander

We consider a non-negative and one-homogeneous energy functional J on a Hilbert space. The paper provides an exact relation between the solutions of the associated gradient-flow equations and the energetic solutions generated via the rate-independent system given in terms of the time-dependent functional E(t,u)=tJ(u) and the norm as a dissipation distance. The relation between the two flows is given via a solution-dependent reparametrization of time that can be guessed from the homogeneities of energy and dissipations in the two equations. We provide several examples including the total-variation flow and show that equivalence of the two systems through a solution dependent reparametrization of the time. Making the relation mathematically rigorous includes a careful analysis of the jumps in energetic solutions which correspond to constant-speed intervals for the solutions of the gradient-flow equation. As a major result we obtain a non-trivial existence and uniqueness result for the energetic rate-independent system.