English

Divergence-free drifts decrease concentration

Analysis of PDEs 2026-03-10 v1

Abstract

We show that bounded divergence-free vector fields u:[0,)×RdRdu : [0,\infty) \times \mathbb{R}^d \to\mathbb{R}^d decrease the ''concentration'', quantified by the modulus of absolute continuity with respect to the Lebesgue measure, of solutions to the associated advection-diffusion equation when compared to solutions to the heat equation. In particular, for symmetric decreasing initial data, the solution to the advection-diffusion equation has (without a prefactor constant) larger variance, larger entropy, and smaller LpL^p norms for all p[1,]p \in [1,\infty] than the solution to the heat equation. We also note that the same is not true on Td\mathbb{T}^d.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.16723,
  title  = {Divergence-free drifts decrease concentration},
  author = {Elias Hess-Childs and Renaud Raquépas and Keefer Rowan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.16723},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

24 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:29:05.324Z