The existence of global-in-time weak solutions to reaction-cross-diffusion systems for an arbitrary number of competing population species is proved. The equations can be derived from an on-lattice random-walk model with general transition rates. In the case of linear transition rates, it extends the two-species population model of Shigesada, Kawasaki, and Teramoto. The equations are considered in a bounded domain with homogeneous Neumann boundary conditions. The existence proof is based on a refined entropy method and a new approximation scheme. Global existence follows under a detailed balance or weak cross-diffusion condition. The detailed balance condition is related to the symmetry of the mobility matrix, which mirrors Onsager's principle in thermodynamics. Under detailed balance (and without reaction) the entropy is nonincreasing in time, but counter-examples show that the entropy may increase initially if detailed balance does not hold. Mathematics Subject Classification

Abstract. We study the Cauchy theory for a multi-species mixture, where the different species can have different masses, in a perturbative setting on the 3-dimensional torus. The ultimate aim of this work is to obtain existence, uniqueness and exponential trend to equilibrium of solutions to the multi-species Boltzmannis a polynomial weight. We prove the existence of a spectral gap for the linear multi-species Boltzmann operator allowing different masses, and then we establish a semigroup property thanks to a new explicit coercive estimate for the Boltzmann operator. Then we develop an L 2 − L ∞ theoryà la Guo for the linear perturbed equation. Finally, we combine the latter results with a decomposition of the multi-species Boltzmann equation in order to deal with the full equation. We emphasize that dealing with different masses induces a loss of symmetry in the Boltzmann operator which prevents the direct adaptation of standard mono-species methods (e.g. Carleman representation, Povzner inequality). Of important note is the fact that all methods used and developed in this work are constructive. Moreover, they do not require any Sobolev regularity and the L 1 v L ∞ x framework is dealt with for any k > k 0 , recovering the optimal physical threshold of finite energy k 0 = 2 in the particular case of a multi-species hard spheres mixture with same masses.

A new coercivity estimate on the spectral gap of the linearized Boltzmann collision operator for multiple species is proved. The assumptions on the collision kernels include hard and Maxwellian potentials under Grad's angular cut-off condition. Two proofs are given: a non-constructive one, based on the decomposition of the collision operator into a compact and a coercive part, and a constructive one, which exploits the "cross-effects" coming from collisions between different species and which yields explicit constants. Furthermore, the essential spectra of the linearized collision operator and the linearized Boltzmann operator are calculated. Based on the spectral-gap estimate, the exponential convergence towards global equilibrium with explicit rate is shown for solutions to the linearized multi-species Boltzmann system on the torus. The convergence is achieved by the interplay between the dissipative collision operator and the conservative transport operator and is proved by using the hypocoercivity method of Mouhot and Neumann.

The mean-field limit in a weakly interacting stochastic many-particle system for multiple population species in the whole space is proved. The limiting system consists of cross-diffusion equations, modeling the segregation of populations. The mean-field limit is performed in two steps: First, the many-particle system leads in the large population limit to an intermediate nonlocal diffusion system. The local cross-diffusion system is then obtained from the nonlocal system when the interaction potentials approach the Dirac delta distribution. The global existence of the limiting and the intermediate diffusion systems is shown for small initial data, and an error estimate is given.

This paper links at the formal level the entropy structure of a multi-species cross-diffusion system of Shigesada-Kawasaki-Teramoto (SKT) type (cf. [1]) satisfying the detailed balance condition with the entropy structure of a reversible microscopic manyparticle Markov process on a discretised space. The link is established by first performing a mean-field limit to a master equation over discretised space. Then the spatial discretisation limit is performed in a completely rigorous way. This by itself provides a novel strategy for proving global existence of weak solutions to a class of cross-diffusion systems.