The shape of the emerging condensate in effective models of condensation (Q1649992)

A condensation in a physical system of many particles occurs when a given relevant quantity has the same value for a macroscopic fraction of those particles. The authors are interested in what a condensing system looks like when it is dynamically close to condensation. They investigate effective models and manifestations of condensation in a scalar variable. For \(t\geq 0\), the finite measure \(p_t\) describes the concentration of particles at a relevant quantity \(x\), and \((p_t)_{t\geq 0}\) solves the equation \(\partial_t p_t(dx)=F(x,p_t),\) where \(F\) is a given functional. In the paper, the following three examples of such systems are considerd: Kingman's model, an approximate model of the Bose-Einstein condensation, and a model for bosons in a heat bath. A condensation is characterized by the behavior of \(p_t\) as \(t\to t^*\), where \(t^*\leq \infty\) is the time at which condensation occurs. The paper gives a natural condition under which the buildup of the condensate occurs on a spatial scale of \(1/t\) and has the universal form of a gamma density.