Chemical reactions as \(\Gamma\)-limit of diffusion (Q2902838)

The authors explore the high activation energy limit of the Kramers-Smoluchowski equation (a special form of the Fokker-Planck equation) that describes the evolution of the probability density of a particle performing a Brownian motion under a specially scaled chemical potential (in terms of a small length parameter \(\epsilon\)). They prove that, in the limit of \(\epsilon\to 0\), solutions of the Kramers-Smoluchowski equation converge to solutions of a linear reaction-diffusion equation. In this way, they succeed to give a rigorous derivation of the well-known Kramers formula and show mathematically that (under certain structural assumptions on the reaction part) diffusion and reaction can be embedded in the same (variational) framework.