Formation of clusters and coarsening in weakly interacting diffusions

Abstract This paper studies the clustering behaviour of weakly interacting diffusions under the influence of sufficiently localized attractive interaction potentials on the one-dimensional torus. We describe how this clustering behaviour is closely related to the presence of discontinuous phase transitions in the mean-field PDE. For local attractive interactions, we employ a new variant of the strict Riesz rearrangement inequality to prove that all global minimizers of the free energy are either uniform or single-cluster states, in the sense that they are symmetrically decreasing. We analyse different timescales for the particle system and the mean-field (McKean–Vlasov) PDE, arguing that while the particle system can exhibit coarsening by both coalescence and diffusive mass exchange between clusters, the clusters in the mean-field PDE are unable to move and coarsening occurs via the mass exchange of clusters. By introducing a new model for this mass exchange, we argue that the PDE exhibits dynamical metastability. We conclude by presenting careful numerical experiments that demonstrate the validity of our model.