College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
AMCS Seminar
Abstract:
In order to respond to an external signal in the environment, bacteria change their frequency of turning and move directly toward (or away from) the signal. A transport equation describes the motion of individuals, whose velocity changes are governed by a Poisson process, in a microscopic level. Since it is difficult to study the solutions of this equation mathematically, it is of great interest to study the movement of bacteria (called chemotaxis) at macroscopic level and to derive an equation for the density of the population of bacteria starting from microscopic equations. We will show that the asymptotic behavior of solutions of such equations (in macroscopic level) can be approximated by the solution of an advection-diffusion equation obtained via a regular perturbation expansion.