Cross Diffusion and Nonlocal Interaction: Some Results on Energy Functionals and PDE Systems

In this thesis we present some results on cross-diffusion and nonlocal interaction. In the first part we study a PDE model for two diffusing species interacting by local size exclusion and global attraction. This leads to a nonlinear degenerate cross-diffusion system, for which we provide a global existence result. The analysis is motivated by the formulation of the system as a formal gradient flow for an appropriate energy functional consisting of entropic terms as well as quadratic nonlocal terms. Key ingredients are entropy dissipation methods as well as the recently developed boundedness by entropy principle. Moreover, we investigate phase separation effects inherent in the cross-diffusion model by an analytical and numerical study of minimizers of the energy functional and their asymptotics to a previously studied case as the diffusivity tends to zero. Finally we briefly discuss coarsening dynamics in the system, which can be observed in numerical results and is motivated by rewriting the PDEs as a system of nonlocal Cahn-Hilliard equations. Proving the uniqueness of solutions to multi-species cross-diffusion systems is a difficult task in the general case, and very few results exist in this direction. In the second part of this thesis, we study a particular system with zero-flux boundary conditions for which the existence of a weak solution has been proven in [60]. Under additional assumptions on the value of the cross-diffusion coefficients, we are able to show the existence and uniqueness of nonnegative strong solutions. The proof of the existence relies on the use of an appropriate linearized problem and a fixed-point argument. In addition, a weak-strong stability result is obtained for this system in dimension one which also implies uniqueness of weak solutions. In the third part we focus on a class of integral functionals known as nonlocal perimeters. Intuitively, these functionals express a weighted interaction between a set and its complement. The weight is provided by a positive kernel K which might be singular. We show that these functionals are indeed perimeters in a generalised sense and we establish existence of minimisers for the corresponding Plateau’s problem. Also, when K is radial and strictly decreasing, we prove that halfspaces are minimisers if we prescribe “flat” boundary conditions. Furthermore, a Γ-convergence result is discussed. We study the limiting behaviour of the nonlocal perimeters associated with certain rescalings of a given kernel which might be singular in the origin but that have faster-than-L 1 decay at infinity and we show that the Γ-limit is the classical perimeter, up to a multiplicative constant that we give explicitly