Convergence problems in nonlocal dynamics with nonlinearity

Abstract

We uncover the gradient structure to investigate the convergence of solutions in nonlocal nonlinear dynamical systems. Mainly but not exclusively, we use the Lojasiewicz inequality to prove convergence results in various spaces with continuous, or discrete temporal domain, and finite, or infinite dimensional spatial domain. To be more specific, we analyze Lotka-Volterra type dynamics and concentration-dispersion dynamics. Lotka-Volterra equations describe the population dynamics of a group of species. Under the assumption that the interaction between species is symmetric, we present two different methods to derive the convergence result. One, the entropy trapping method, is to adapt the idea of Akin and Hofbauer (Math. Biosci. 61 (1982) 51-62) of using monotonicity of the energy to bound the entropy, which provides the proximal distance of the solution from the desired equilibrium. Another method, inspired by Jabin and Liu's observation in (Nonlinearity 30 (2017) 4220) is to change variables to resolve the singular nature of gradient structure. We apply this idea to show the convergence result in generalized Lokta-Volterra systems, such as regularized Lotka-Volterra systems and infinite dimensional Lotka-Volterra equations with mutation. Concentration-dispersion dynamics is a new type of equation that is inspired by fixed point formulations for solitary wave shapes. As a continuous time analogue of Petviashvili iteration, we aim to dynamically calculate the nontrivial solitary wave profile. Using the gradient structure we deduce the existence of nontrivial solitary and periodic wave profiles. Unfortunately, the convergence result remains open. Instead, we regularize the concentration dispersion equations by adding a nonlinear diffusive term, and prove the convergence of the solutions by using the Lojasiewicz convergence framework.