English

Continuum of coupled Wasserstein gradient flows

Analysis of PDEs 2024-11-22 v1

Abstract

We study a system of drift-diffusion PDEs for a potentially infinite number of incompressible phases, subject to a joint pointwise volume constraint. Our analysis is based on the interpretation as a collection of coupled Wasserstein gradient flows or, equivalently, as a gradient flow in the space of couplings under a `fibered' Wasserstein distance. We prove existence of weak solutions, long-time asymptotics, and stability with respect to the mass distribution of the phases, including the discrete to continuous limit. A key step is to establish convergence of the product of pressure gradient and density, jointly over the infinite number of phases. The underlying energy functional is the objective of entropy regularized optimal transport, which allows us to interpret the model as the relaxation of the classical Angenent-Haker-Tannenbaum (AHT) scheme to the entropic setting. However, in contrast to the AHT scheme's lack of convergence guarantees, the relaxed scheme is unconditionally convergent. We conclude with numerical illustrations of the main results.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2411.13969,
  title  = {Continuum of coupled Wasserstein gradient flows},
  author = {Clément Cancès and Daniel Matthes and Ismael Medina and Bernhard Schmitzer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.13969},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

36 pages, 8 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:07:32.847Z