Roman Shvydkoy, Changhui Tan

Abstract

We study the hydrodynamic limit of kinetic flocking models with nonlinear velocity alignment and strong local Fokker--Planck forcing. In the limit of small Knudsen number the kinetic densities converge to a local Maxwellian centered around macroscopic quantities satisfying the compressible Euler system with isothermal pressure \(p = \sigma\rho\), while macroscopic alignment is obtained by convolution of the microscopic velocity law with the standard Gaussian, resulting in a different nonlinearity. Such discrepancy has been observed already in the work of Black and Tan [KRM, 18(4):609–632, 2025].

In this note we rigorously justify the limit for admissible weak kinetic solutions and non-vacuous limiting macroscopic solution. Our analysis provides a quantitative rate of convergence in terms of relative entropy: \(\mathcal H(f_\varepsilon | \mu) \lesssim \varepsilon \bigl(1+|\log\varepsilon|^{p-2}\bigr)\) provided initially \(\mathcal H(f_\varepsilon(0) | \mu(0)) \leq \varepsilon\), where \(p\) is the order of non-linearity in the alignment force. In the linear case \(p=2\) we recover the known result of Karper, Mellet, and Trivisa [M3AS, 25(01):131–163, 2015].

This work is supported by NSF grants DMS #2238219