A homogenization approach for the motion of motor proteins (Q1938512)

The authors describe the asymptotic behaviour of the solution \( (n_{\varepsilon }^{1},n_{\varepsilon }^{2})\) of the weakly coupled Fokker-Planck system \[ n_{\varepsilon ,t}^{1}-\varepsilon \Delta n_{\varepsilon }^{1}-\mathrm{div}_{x}(n_{\varepsilon }^{1}D_{y}\psi (\frac{x}{ \varepsilon }))+\frac{1}{\varepsilon }\nu ^{1}(\frac{x}{\varepsilon } )n_{\varepsilon }^{1}=\frac{1}{\varepsilon }\nu ^{2}(\frac{x}{\varepsilon } )n_{\varepsilon }^{2}; \] \[ n_{\varepsilon ,t}^{2}-\varepsilon \Delta n_{\varepsilon }^{2}+\frac{1}{\varepsilon }\nu ^{2}(\frac{x}{\varepsilon } )n_{\varepsilon }^{2}=\frac{1}{\varepsilon }\nu ^{1}(\frac{x}{\varepsilon } )n_{\varepsilon }^{1}. \] The problem models a molecular motor for proteins along molecular filaments or microtubes. It is posed in \(\mathbb{R} ^{d}\times (0,+\infty).\) Here \(\nu ^{1}\), \(\nu ^{2}\) and \(\psi \) are smooth and 1-periodic functions with \(\nu ^{1}\) and \(\nu ^{2}\) positive. The authors assume that the initial data \(n_{\varepsilon }^{1}(x,0)\) and \( n_{\varepsilon }^{2}(x,0)\) are positive in \(\mathbb{R}^{d}\), that \(\int_{ \mathbb{R}^{d}}(n_{\varepsilon }^{1}(x,0)+n_{\varepsilon }^{2}(x,0))dx\) converges to some \(I_{0}>0\) when \(\varepsilon \) goes to 0 and that there exist two constants \(A>0\) and \(B\) such that \(n_{\varepsilon }^{i}(x,0)\leq \exp (\varepsilon ^{-1}(-A\left| x\right| +B))\) on \(\mathbb{R}^{d}\), \(i=1,2\). The first main result proves that \(n_{\varepsilon }^{1}(x,t)+n_{\varepsilon }^{2}(x,t)\) converges in the weak sense of measures to \(\delta (x-t\overline{v})I_{0}\) for some \(\overline{v}\in \) \( \mathbb{R}^{d}\), where \(\delta \) is the Dirac measure at 0. For the proof, the authors write \(n_{\varepsilon }^{i}=\exp (-R_{\varepsilon }^{i}/\varepsilon )\), and they write the equations satisfied by the functions \(R_{\varepsilon }^{i}\). The second main result gathers some properties of \[ \underline{R}^{i}(x,t)=\liminf_{(y,s)\underset{\varepsilon \rightarrow 0}{ \rightarrow }(x,t)}R_{\varepsilon }^{i}(y,s)\;\text{ and }\;\overline{R} ^{i}(x,t)=\limsup_{(y,s)\underset{\varepsilon \rightarrow 0}{\rightarrow } (x,t)}R_{\varepsilon }^{i}(y,s). \] The proofs of these results are essentially based on comparison principles for viscosity solutions of these equations.