Brownian particles with long- and short-range interactions

Pierre-Henri Chavanis

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2011, vol. 390, issue 9, 1546-1574

Abstract: We develop the kinetic theory of Brownian particles with long- and short-range interactions. Since the particles are in contact with a thermal bath fixing the temperature T, they are described by the canonical ensemble. We consider both overdamped and inertial models. In the overdamped limit, the evolution of the spatial density is governed by the generalized mean field Smoluchowski equation including a mean field potential due to long-range interactions and a generically nonlinear barotropic pressure due to short-range interactions. This equation describes various physical systems such as self-gravitating Brownian particles (Smoluchowski–Poisson system), bacterial populations experiencing chemotaxis (Keller–Segel model) and colloidal particles with capillary interactions. We also take into account the inertia of the particles and derive corresponding kinetic and hydrodynamic equations generalizing the usual Kramers, Jeans, Euler and Cattaneo equations. For each model, we provide the corresponding form of free energy and establish the H-theorem and the virial theorem. Finally, we show that the same hydrodynamic equations are obtained in the context of nonlinear mean field Fokker–Planck equations associated with generalized thermodynamics. However, in that case, the nonlinear pressure is due to the bias in the transition probabilities from one state to the other leading to non-Boltzmannian distributions while in the former case the distribution is Boltzmannian but the nonlinear pressure arises from the two-body correlation function induced by the short-range potential of interaction. As a whole, our paper develops connections between the topics of long-range interactions, short-range interactions, nonlinear mean field Fokker–Planck equations and generalized thermodynamics. It also justifies from a kinetic theory based on microscopic processes, the basic equations that were introduced phenomenologically to describe self-gravitating Brownian particles, chemotaxis and colloidal suspensions with attractive interactions.

Keywords: Long-range interactions; Brownian particles; Kinetic theory; Nonlinear mean field Fokker–Planck equations; Generalized thermodynamics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:390:y:2011:i:9:p:1546-1574

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2010.12.018

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