Convergence of a fully discrete and energy-dissipating finite-volume scheme for aggregation-diffusion equations

Abstract

We study an implicit finite-volume scheme for nonlinear, non-local aggregation-diffusion equations which exhibit a gradient-flow structure, recently introduced in [R. Bailo, J. A. Carrillo and J. Hu, Fully discrete positivity-preserving and energy-dissipating schemes for aggregation-diffusion equations with a gradient flow structure, arXiv:1811.11502 ]. Crucially, this scheme keeps the dissipation property of an associated fully discrete energy, and does so unconditionally with respect to the time step. Our main contribution in this work is to show the convergence of the method under suitable assumptions on the diffusion functions and potentials involved.