Nonlinear stability criteria for the HMF model (Q524285)

The authors prove a nonlinear stability result for steady state solutions to the Hamiltonian mean field model written as \(\partial _{t}f+\nu \partial _{\theta }f-\partial _{\theta }\phi _{f}\partial _{\nu }f=0\) posed in \( \mathbb{R}_{+}\times \mathbb{T}\times \mathbb{R}\) where \(\mathbb{T}\) is the flat torus \(\left[ 0,2\pi \right] \) and \(\phi _{f}\) is the self-consistent potential associated to \(f\) through \( \phi _{f}(\theta )=-\int_{0}^{2\pi }\int_{\mathbb{R}}f(\theta ^{\prime },\nu )d\nu \cos (\theta -\theta ^{\prime })d\theta ^{\prime }\). The initial condition \( f(0,\theta ,\nu )=f_{\mathrm{init}}(\theta ,\nu )\geq 0\) is added. The authors look for steady state solutions of the form \(f_{0}(\theta ,\nu )=F(\frac{\nu ^{2} }{2}-m_{0}\cos \theta )\) with \(m_{0}>0\) where \(F\) is a continuous function which satisfies further hypotheses, the authors giving different examples of such functions. The main result of the paper proves the existence of \(\delta >0\) such that for every \[ f\in L^{1}((1+\left| \nu \right| ^{2})d\theta d\nu ) \text{ satisfying } \left| M_{f}-M_{f_{0}(\cdot -\theta _{f})}\right| <\delta \] with \(M_{f}=\int_{0}^{2\pi }\int_{\mathbb{R}}f(\theta ,\nu )d\nu (\cos \theta ,\sin \theta )^{T}d\theta \), \(\left\| f-f_{0}(\cdot -\theta _{f})\right\| _{L^{1}}^{2}\) is less than a quantity involving the nonlinear energies of \(f\) and of \(f_{0}\) and the data of the problem. For this result which requires appropriate hypotheses on the data of the problem, the authors deduce a stability result. For the proof, the authors first introduce a reduced energy functional \(\mathcal I\) which only depends on the modulus of the magnetization \(M_{f}\) and they give an upper bound for \(\mathcal{I}(\left| M_{f}\right| )-\mathcal{I]}(\left| M_{f_{0}}\right| )\). They then prove that the magnetization of a steady state is a strict local minimizer of this reduced energy functional. They finally quote a result proved by the first author [Commun. Math. Phys. 348, No. 2, 695--727 (2016; Zbl 1356.26007)] in order to control the distribution function \(f\).