Sticky particles and the pressureless Euler equations in one spatial dimension

Abstract

We consider the dynamics of finite systems of point masses which move along the real line. We suppose the particles interact pairwise and undergo perfectly inelastic collisions when they collide. In particular, once particles collide, they remain stuck together thereafter. Our main result is that if the interaction potential is semi convex, this sticky particle property can be quantified and is preserved upon letting the number of particles tend to infinity. This is used to show that solutions of the pressureless Euler equations exist for given initial conditions and satisfy an entropy inequality.