Abstract
Subdiffusive motion takes place at a much slower timescale than diffusive motion. As a preliminary step to studying reaction-subdiffusion pulled fronts, we consider here the hyperbolic limit
Keywords
Introduction
Model description
Consistent experimental evidence stemming from recent methodological advances in cell biology such as in vivo single molecule tracking, report that the intra-cellular random motion of certain molecules often deviates from Brownian motion. Macroscopically, their mean squared displacement does not scale linearly with time, but as a power law
One of the standard mechanisms used to describe the emergence of subdiffusion in cells is continuous time random walks (CTRW), a generalisation of random walks that couples a waiting time random process at each ‘jump’ of the random walk [28]. CTRW can be used [25–27] to derive macroscopic equations governing the spatiotemporal dynamics of the density of random walkers located at position x at time t:
In this work, following [35], we take an alternative approach that rescues the Markovian property of the jump process at the expense of a supplementary age variable. We associate each random walker with a residence time (age, in short) a, which is reset when the random walker jumps to another location. We denote by
(Space jump kernel ω and jump rate β).
We assume that ω is an isotropic multivariate normal distribution of mean 0 and variance
The specific choice of the rate of jump β is crucial. Only the case
The fact that the loss term
We restrict to initial conditions compactly supported in age. More precisely we have the following assumption:
The probability that a particle reaches age a without jumping is
Our motivation is the asymptotic analysis of pulled fronts in reaction-subdiffusion equations in the hyperbolic regime
Hyperbolic limit and derivation of the Hamilton–Jacobi equation
We perform the Hopf–Cole transformation in order to study the large scale asymptotics:
The function
Accordingly, the function
(About the scaling).
We emphasize that the limiting equation (1.12) makes sense for a large class of functions β, including constant rates of jump. On the contrary, diffusion limits depend on the decay properties of β, as illustrated by the anomalous scaling
We discuss several properties of the Hamiltonian H in Section 2: its smoothness, coercivity, convexity but lack of strict uniform convexity, and its asymptotic behaviour near 0 and ∞.
We recall that, under suitable hypotheses on the Hamiltonian H and on the initial condition g, classical existence and uniqueness results hold for the evolution Hamilton–Jacobi Cauchy problem:
We state hereafter a relevant uniqueness theorem in a suitable class of functions: a version of [9, Theorems 19.11 and 19.17] for a homogeneous Hamiltonian that is not polynomially bounded above.
(Uniqueness theorem).
Let H be locally Lipschitz, convex and superlinear. Let g be bounded below and Lipschitz continuous. Then there exists a unique viscosity solution of ( 1.14 ) within the class of Lipschitz continuous functions.
This uniqueness theorem is a corollary of [9, Corollary 19.17], which follows from [9, Theorem 19.11]. In that last theorem it is assumed that H has polynomial growth for
Main hypotheses and results
In this work we establish the rigorous proof of convergence from (1.7) to (1.12) as
(Initial condition
).
We assume that the initial condition has the following form:
We assume that there exists a limit function v such that
The following theorem is our main result.
Under Hypotheses
1
and
2
,
The reader will find in Appendix A.1 a comprehensive discussion about the hypotheses and some highlights of the proof. The initial condition has the following shape in the original unknown:
Organization of the article
Section 3 deals with the regularity of the solution which in turm yields compactness of
During the first revision stage of this manuscript, the authors became aware of a preprint by Nordmann, Perthame, and Taing – now published [31], which adresses similar questions in the context of evolutionary biology. Our model is simpler as it is conservative, and jump rates are homogeneous with respect to the space variable. On the other hand, our results are stronger as we establish the rigorous limit of the problem as
Properties of the Hamiltonian
We will now prove that the Hamiltonian H satisfies some properties often encountered in the literature.
The Hamiltonian H defined in (
1.13
) has the following properties:
H exhibits quadratic growth at infinity.
H is convex, but not strictly uniformly convex.
Let
The function F is We have:
Differentiating equation (1.11) with respect to p yields the following identity:
However, the Hamiltonian H is not strictly uniformly convex, since
□
Around
We have
Around ∞, we have
Back to the computations of Proposition 4, we find:
For a visual representation of the evolution in time of the solution
The initial conditions in the first and third subfigures are chosen so as to decay with a preserved profile in log–log scale for the Hamilton–Jacobi equations
The values of

(Colour online) Decay of
For the sake of clarity, we present all our proofs in one-dimension of space
We will work over the set
This whole section deals with the proof of the following Theorem.
Let
Section 3.1 proves certain more accurate ε-dependent bounds (3.7) from which the uniform bounds of Theorem 6(1) follow. The Lipschitz continuity results of Theorem 6(2) and Theorem 6(3) are proved in Sections 3.2 and 3.3 respectively. As mentioned previously in Section A.1.1, the space-homogeneous problem exhibits a self-similar decay in the original variables [3]. This precludes any time uniform
This subsection deals with the proof of Theorem 6(1).
From the scaling (1.5) and the Ansatz (1.15) we see that
Let us define
The rest of this subsection is devoted to proving the upper bound (3.2) in Theorem 6(1). From equation (1.10) we recover:
This subsection deals with the proof of Theorem 6(2).
The keystone of our proof is an application of the maximum principle to the increase rate of
The use of the maximum principle requires bounded functions. As such, we introduce the following truncation (from above) of the initial data:
We begin with the proof of the upper bound. Assume by contradiction that there exist
Meaning that
By subtracting equation (1.10) evaluated at
This contradiction proves any space difference quotient of
We proceed similarly for the time Lipschitz estimate. However, we bypass the rigorous use of difference quotients, as in (3.9), but we differentiate the equation with respect to time. A rigorous proof can be obtained by a straightforward adaptation of the following arguments.
We may reformulate (1.10) as follows,
We examine the upper bound and the lower bound separately. For the upper bound, assume by contradiction that there exists
Equations (3.16) and (3.19) assume
For the lower bound, we can ignore the contribution involving
In this section, we continue to work over
We deduce from the Lipschitz estimates that there exists a Lipschitz function
Equation (1.10) is equivalent to the following, which allows us to define
Viscosity subsolution
Under Hypotheses
1
and
2
,
Let
Since Ψ is
It follows that:
Therefore
In order to prove that
We proceed in several steps. The key idea is to compare the relative weigths of
Step 1: A crude estimate on
(Simple bounds for
).
This is a consequence of the following claim: for all
We now write
Step 2: A lower bound for
Semi-concavity is a natural regularity for Hamilton–Jacobi equations. It can result either from the propagation of regularity on the initial data, or on regularization property of the Hamilton–Jacobi equation [12, Chapter 3.3]. The latter usually relies on uniform convexity of the Hamiltonian, which is not the case here. Below, we derive propagation estimates for
For ε small enough and
First, let us prove that the semi-concavity of the initial condition is preserved. By differentiating (1.10) twice with respect to x, we obtain:
Step 3: An upper bound on
Let us fix
We deduce from the identity
Step 4: An upper bound on
Under Hypotheses
1
and
2
, for any
Step 5: Conclusion of the proof. The accurate upper bound on
Under Hypotheses
1
and
2
,
Let
If
If
The contribution
Thanks to the local maximum property we have:
∙ Limit of
Since
∙ Limit of
Since
Passing to the limit
Propositions 7 and 12 prove
Assume Hypothesis
2
and replace Hypothesis
1
by the following. Let ω be an isotropic multivariate continuous probability distribution of mean 0 such that, for some positive δ,
Then
Let us sum up step by step the sufficient changes to our proofs.
Proposition 3 is modified as follows: The Hamiltonian function H is well defined in (1.13), albeit only over an open set containing strictly The Hamiltonian satisfies an inequality similar to The proof of convexity holds. Hence the hypotheses of Theorem 1 hold: the modified limiting Hamilton–Jacobi equation
The bounds of Theorem 6 suffer the following alterations: The proof of the The constant C appearing in the equation is modified, but it remains a finite, positive constant. The proof of Lipschitz continuity in space is unaffected. The Lipschitz bound in time maintains the same expression and is still finite. Viscosity limit procedure, Section 4: Proposition 7 (viscosity subsolution) is unaffected. As for the viscosity supersolution procedure, Lemma 8 is unaffected, and the analytical expressions in Lemmas 9 and 10, as well as in Proposition 11 remain the same (with different constants, as defined). The symmetry of ω plays a role in Proposition 12, as does the boundedness of
It follows that
Footnotes
There are three main aspects we would like to discuss in this appendix. First we briefly discuss the technical motivation for our choices of hypotheses and proof strategies, and give a synthetic presentation of the main ideas behind our work. Second, we will support and elaborate on the claim we make, that equation (1.11) is the same as the limiting Hamilton–Jacobi equation derived after renormalising n by a non-stationary measure inspired by [3] that approaches a meaningful self-similar profile. Third, we will discuss a setting in which the jump rate β depends not only on age but also on space. For the sake of simplicity, the two last parts are presented in dimension
Acknowledgements
This work was initiated within the framework of the LABEX MILYON (ANR-10-LABX-0070) of Université de Lyon, within the programme ‘Investissements d’Avenir’ (ANR-11-IDEX-0007) operated by the French National Research Agency (ANR).
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 639638).
The second author was supported by the ANR project KIBORD. (ANR-13-BS01-0004).
During the project, the third author was affiliated to the Unité de Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées (UMPA) UMR CNRS 5669, of the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and to the Project-Team Beagle of the Inria Rhône-Alpes.
We wish to thank Thomas Lepoutre and Hugues Berry for many fruitful discussions.
We wish to thank the anonymous reviewer for his or her thorough and useful work.
