Fick's Law in Non-Local Evolution Equations

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 $m^*\left(β\right)=\sqrt{1-1/β}$, which divides the metastable region from the unstable one, the inverse temperature being fixed and larger than the critical value $β_c=1$. Due to the non-equilibrium setting, a non zero magnetization current, which scales with the inverse of the size of the volume $\varepsilon^{-1}$, do flow in the system. Here $\varepsilon^{-1}$ also represents the ratio of macroscopic and mesoscopic length. We show that for $\varepsilon>0$ small enough, the stationary profile has no discontinuities so that no phase transition occurs; although expected when the magnetizations are larger than $m_β$, this turns out to be non trivial at all in the metastable region. Moreover, when $\varepsilon^{-1}\to\infty$, 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.