From diffusion to reaction via Gamma-Convergence

We study the limit of high activation energy of a special Fokker-Planck equation known as the Kramers-Smoluchowski equation (KS). This equation governs the time evolution of the probability density of a particle performing a Brownian motion under the influence of a chemical potential H/epsilon. We choose H having two wells corresponding to two chemical states A and B. We prove that after a suitable rescaling the solution to KS converges, in the limit of high activation energy (epsilon -> 0), to the solution of a simple system modeling the diffusion of A and B, and the reaction A reversible arrow B. The aim of this paper is to give a rigorous proof of Kramers's formal derivation and to embed chemical reactions and diffusion processes in a common variational framework which allows one to derive the former as a singular limit of the latter, thus establishing a connection between two worlds often regarded as separate. The singular limit is analyzed by means of Gamma-convergence in the space of finite Borel measures endowed with the weak-* topology.