Mean-Field Convergence of Systems of Particles with Coulomb Interactions in Higher Dimensions without Regularity

Abstract

We consider first-order conservative systems of particles with binary Coulomb interactions in the mean-field scaling regime in dimensions $d\geq 3$. We show that if at some time, the associated sequence of empirical measures converges in a suitable sense to a probability measure with bounded density $\omega^0$ as the number of particles $N\rightarrow\infty$, then the sequence converges for short times in the weak-* topology for measures to the unique solution of the mean-field PDE with initial datum $\omega^0$. This result extends our previous work arXiv:2004.04140 for point vortices (i.e. $d=2$). In contrast to the previous work arXiv:1803.08345, our theorem only requires the limiting measure belong to a scaling-critical function space for the well-posedness of the mean-field PDE, in particular requiring no regularity. Our proof is based on a combination of the modulated-energy method of Serfaty and a novel mollification argument first introduced by the author in arXiv:2004.04140.