Nicolas Vauchelet

Casimir Emako, Charlène Gayrard, Axel Buguin et al.

Mathematical models have been widely used to describe the collective movement of bacteria by chemotaxis. In particular, bacterial concentration waves traveling in a narrow channel have been experimentally observed and can be precisely described thanks to a mathematical model at the macroscopic scale. Such model was derived in [1] using a kinetic model based on an accurate description of the mesoscopic run-and-tumble process. We extend this approach to study the behavior of the interaction between two populations of E. Coli. Separately, each population travels with its own speed in the channel. When put together, a synchronization of the speed of the traveling pulses can be observed. We show that this synchronization depends on the fraction of the fast population. Our approach is based on mathematical analysis of a macroscopic model of partial differential equations. Numerical simulations in comparison with experimental observations show qualitative agreement.

François Delarue, Frédéric Lagoutière, Nicolas Vauchelet

An analysis of the error of the upwind scheme for transport equation with discontinuous coefficients is provided. We consider here a velocity field that is bounded and one-sided Lipschitz continuous. In this framework, solutions are defined in the sense of measures along the lines of Poupaud and Rascle's work. We study the convergence order of the upwind scheme in the Wasserstein distances. More precisely, we prove that in this setting the convergence order is 1/2. We also show the optimality of this result. In the appendix, we show that this result also applies to other "diffusive" "first order" schemes and to a forward semi-Lagrangian scheme.