Weak convergence of the empirical measure for the Keller-Segel model in both subcritical and critical cases

Abstract

We show the weak convergence, up to extraction of a subsequence, of the empirical measure for the Keller-Segel system of particles in both subcritical and critical cases, for general initial conditions. This particle system consists of $N$ planar Brownian motions interacting through a Coulombian attractive force, which is quite singular. In the subcritical case, a stronger result has been established by Bresch-Jabin-Wang \cite{bjw} at the price of two simplifications: the whole space $\rr^2$ is replaced by a torus and the initial condition is assumed to be regular. In the subcritical case, our proof is fairly straightforward: we use a {\it two particles} moment argument, which shows that particles do not aggregate in finite time, uniformly in the number of particles. The critical case requires more work.