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Long term convergence rate of Smoluchowski-Kramers approximation by Stein's method

Probability 2026-02-03 v1

Abstract

We consider the following second-order stochastic differential equation on R2d\mathbb{R}^{2d}: \begin{equation*} dX_t^m=Y_t^mdt, \quad mdY_t^m=b(X_t^m)dt+\sigma(X_t^m)dB_t-Y^m_tdt, \end{equation*} where XtmX^m_t and YtmY^m_t represent the position and velocity of a particle at time tt, m>0m>0 denotes its mass, b:RdRdb:\mathbb{R}^d \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^d is the drift field, σ:RdRd×d\sigma:\mathbb{R}^d \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{d \times d} is the diffusion coefficient, and {Bt}t0\{B_t\}_{t \ge 0} is a dd-dimensional standard Brownian motion. The Smoluchowski--Kramers approximation states that as m0m \rightarrow 0, this system converges to the limiting equation: \begin{equation*} dX_t=b(X_t)dt+\sigma(X_t)dB_t. \end{equation*} Utilizing Stein's method, we prove that the 11-Wasserstein distance between the invariant distribution of XtmX_t^m and that of its small-mass limit XtX_t is of order O(mlnm).O(\sqrt{m}|\ln m|). Particularly, in the one-dimensional case, the convergence rate can be improved to O(m).O(\sqrt{m}).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.00875,
  title  = {Long term convergence rate of Smoluchowski-Kramers approximation by Stein's method},
  author = {Shiyu Liu and Wei Liu and Lihu Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.00875},
  year   = {2026}
}