Dynamics in a Kinetic Model of Oriented Particles with Phase Transition

Motivated by a phenomenon of phase transition in a model of alignment of self-propelled particles, we obtain a kinetic mean-field equation which is nothing more than the Smoluchowski equation on the sphere with dipolar potential. In this self-contained article, using only basic tools, we analyze the dynamics of this equation in any dimension. We first prove global well-posedness of this equation, starting with an initial condition in any Sobolev space. We then compute all possible steady states. There is a threshold for the noise parameter: over this threshold, the only equilibrium is the uniform distribution, and under this threshold, the other equilibria are the Fisher-von Mises distributions with arbitrary direction and a concentration parameter determined by the intensity of the noise. For any initial condition, we give a rigorous proof of convergence of the solution to a steady state as time goes to infinity. In particular, when the noise is under the threshold and with nonzero initial mean velocity, the solution converges exponentially fast to a unique Fisher-von Mises distribution. We also found a new conservation relation, which can be viewed as a convex quadratic entropy when the noise is above the threshold. This provides a uniform exponential rate of convergence to the uniform distribution. At the threshold, we show algebraic decay to the uniform distribution.