A multi-species chemotaxis system: Lyapunov functionals, duality, critical mass

Abstract

We introduce a multi-species chemotaxis type system admitting an arbitrarily large number of population species, all of which are attracted vs.\ repelled by a single chemical substance. The production vs.\ destruction rates of the chemotactic substance by the species is described by a probability measure. For such a model we investigate the variational structures, in particular we prove the existence of Lyapunov functionals, we establish duality properties as well as a logarithmic Hardy-Littlewood-Sobolev type inequality for the associated free energy. The latter inequality provides the optimal critical value for the conserved total population mass.