2016, Erbar, Matthias, Fathi, Max, Laschos, Vaios, Schlichting, André

In this work, we show that a family of non-linear mean-field equations on discrete spaces, can be viewed as a gradient flow of a natural free energy functional with respect to a certain metric structure we make explicit. We also prove that this gradient flow structure arises as the limit of the gradient flow structures of a natural sequence of N-particle dynamics, as N goes to infinity.