The purpose of this paper is to establish a new method for proving the convergence of the particle method applied to the Camassa-Holm (CH) equation. The CH equation is a strongly nonlinear, bi-Hamiltonian, completely integrable model in the context of shallow water waves. The equation admits solutions that are nonlinear superpositions of traveling waves that have a discontinuity in the first derivative at their peaks and therefore are called peakons. This behavior admits several diverse scientific applications, but introduce difficult numerical challenges. To accurately capture these solutions, one may apply the particle method to the CH equation. Using the concept of space-time bounded variation, we show that the particle solution converges to a global weak solution of the CH equation for positive Radon measure initial data. Read More: http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789814417099_0033

We consider a kinetic model of self-propelled particles with alignment interaction and with precession about the alignment direction. We derive a hydrodynamic system for the local density and velocity orientation of the particles. The system consists of the conservative equation for the local density and a non-conservative equation for the orientation. First, we assume that the alignment interaction is purely local and derive a first order system. However, we show that this system may lose its hyperbolicity. Under the assumption of weakly non-local interaction, we derive diffusive corrections to the first order system which lead to the combination of a heat flow of the harmonic map and Landau-Lifschitz-Gilbert dynamics. In the particular case of zero self-propelling speed, the resulting model reduces to the phenomenological Landau-Lifschitz-Gilbert equations. Therefore the present theory provides a kinetic formulation of classical micromagnetization models and spin dynamics.

We investigate systems of self-propelled particles with alignment interaction. Compared to previous work (Degond and Motsch, Math. Models Methods Appl. Sci. 18:1193–1215, 2008a; Frouvelle, Math. Models Methods Appl. Sci., 2012), the force acting on the particles is not normalized, and this modification gives rise to phase transitions from disordered states at low density to aligned states at high densities. This model is the space-inhomogeneous extension of (Frouvelle and Liu, Dynamics in a kinetic model of oriented particles with phase transition, 2012), in which the existence and stability of the equilibrium states were investigated. When the density is lower than a threshold value, the dynamics is described by a nonlinear diffusion equation. By contrast, when the density is larger than this threshold value, the dynamics is described by a similar hydrodynamic model for self-alignment interactions as derived in (Degond and Motsch, Math. Models Methods Appl. Sci. 18:1193–1215, 2008a; Frouvelle, Math. Models Methods Appl. Sci., 2012). However, the modified normalization of the force gives rise to different convection speeds, and the resulting model may lose its hyperbolicity in some regions of the state space.

In this paper, we review recent developments on the derivation and properties of macroscopic models of collective motion and self-organization. The starting point is a model of self-propelled particles interacting with its neighbors through alignment. We successively derive a mean-field model and its hydrodynamic limit. The resulting macroscopic model is the Self-Organized Hydrodynamics (SOH). We review the available existence results and known properties of the SOH model and discuss it in view of its possible extensions to other kinds of collective motion.

In this note, we study the phase transitions arising in a modified Smoluchowski equation on the sphere with dipolar potential. This equation models the competition between alignment and diffusion, and the modification consists in taking the strength of alignment and the intensity of the diffusion as functions of the order parameter. We characterize the stable and unstable equilibrium states. For stable equilibria, we provide the exponential rate of convergence. We detail special cases, giving rise to second order and first order phase transitions, respectively. We study the hysteresis diagram, and provide numerical illustrations of this phenomena.