English

Fick's Law in Non-Local Evolution Equations

Mathematical Physics 2018-07-04 v1 math.MP

Abstract

We study the stationary non-local equation which corresponds to the energy functional of a one-dimensional Ising spin system, in which particles interact via a Kac potential. The boundary conditions share the same sign and both lie above the value m(β)=11/βm^*\left(\beta\right)=\sqrt{1-1/\beta}, which divides the metastable region from the unstable one, the inverse temperature being fixed and larger than the critical value βc=1\beta_c=1. Due to the non-equilibrium setting, a non zero magnetization current, which scales with the inverse of the size of the volume ε1\varepsilon^{-1}, do flow in the system. Here ε1\varepsilon^{-1} also represents the ratio of macroscopic and mesoscopic length. We show that for ε>0\varepsilon>0 small enough, the stationary profile has no discontinuities so that no phase transition occurs; although expected when the magnetizations are larger than mβm_{\beta}, this turns out to be non trivial at all in the metastable region. Moreover, when ε1\varepsilon^{-1}\to\infty, the solution converges to that of the corresponding macroscopic problem, i.e. the local diffusion equation. The validity of the Fick's law in this context is then established.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1710.04410,
  title  = {Fick's Law in Non-Local Evolution Equations},
  author = {Roberto Boccagna},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.04410},
  year   = {2018}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:11:13.628Z