Instabilities in the mean field limit

Abstract

Consider a system of $N$ particles interacting through Newton's second law with Coulomb interaction potential in one spatial dimension or a $\mathcal{C}^2$ smooth potential in any dimension. We prove that in the mean field limit $N \to + \infty$, the $N$ particles system displays instabilities in times of order $\log N$ for some configurations approximately distributed according to unstable homogeneous equilibria.Comment: minor typos corrected; Journal of Statistical Physics, accepte