The approximation of the quadratic porous medium equation via nonlocal interacting particles subject to repulsive Morse potential

Abstract

We propose a deterministic particle method for a one-dimensional nonlocal equation with interactions through the repulsive Morse potential. We show that the particle method converges as the number of particles goes to infinity towards weak measure solutions to the nonlocal equation. Such a results is proven under the assumption of initial data in the space of probability measures with finite second moment. In particular, our method is able to capture a measure-to-$L^\infty$ smoothing effect of the limit equation. Moreover, as the Morse potential is rescaled to approach a Dirac delta, corresponding to strongly localised repulsive interactions, the scheme becomes a particle approximation for the quadratic porous medium equation. We show that in the joint limit (localised repulsion and increasing number of particles) the reconstructed density converges to a weak solution of the porous medium equation. The strategy relies on various estimates performed at the particle level, including $L^p$ estimates and an entropy dissipation estimate, which benefit from the particular structure of our particle scheme and from the absolutely continuous reconstruction of the density from the particle locations.