Van Kampen's system-size expansion
Van Kampen's system-size expansion
- Event time: 11:30am
- Event date: 1st July 2011
- Speaker: Dr Bartlomiej Waclaw (School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Edinburgh)
- Location: Room 2511, James Clerk Maxwell Building (JCMB) James Clerk Maxwell Building Peter Guthrie Tait Road Edinburgh EH9 3FD GB
Event details
The van Kampen's expansion is a systematic expansion of the master equation in powers of the system size (volume, number of particles). The leading order terms give deterministic equations which govern the evolution of infinite systems where stochastic fluctuations can be neglected. Second-order terms give rise to a Fokker-Planck equation which describes fluctuations for large but finite systems.
Though it may seem to be yet another text-book method which never gives any useful results in practice, I must say that I have had a pleasure of using the van Kampen's expansion recently and, surprisingly, it has worked very well even for a problem of oscillations in an idealised gene-expression model.
In my talk I will first explain the method on a very simple example which can also be solved exactly without the van Kampen, and then I will show how well it works in more complicated situations.
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