We study a population of N particles, which evolve according to a diffusion process and interact through a dynamical network. In turn, the evolution of the network is coupled to the particles' positions. In contrast with the mean-field regime, in which each particle interacts with every other particle, i.e., with O(N) particles, we consider the a priori more difficult case of a sparse network; that is, each particle interacts, on average, with O(1) particles. We also assume that the network's dynamics is much faster than the particles' dynamics, with the time-scale of the network described by a parameter ∊ > 0. We combine the averaging (∊ → 0) and the many-particles (N → ∞ ) limits and prove that the evolution of the particles' empirical density is described (after taking both limits) by a nonlinear Fokker-Planck equation; moreover, we give conditions under which such limits can be taken uniformly in time, hence providing a criterion under which the limiting nonlinear Fokker-Planck equation is a good approximation of the original system uniformly in time. The heart of our proof consists of controlling precisely the dependence on N of the averaging estimates.

We study the long time behaviour of a large class of diffusion processes on R^N, generated by second order differential operators of (possibly) degenerate type. The operators that we consider need not satisfy the Hörmander Condition (HC). Instead, they satisfy the so-called UFG condition, introduced by Herman, Lobry and Sussman in the context of geometric control theory and later by Kusuoka and Stroock. We demonstrate the importance of the class of UFG processes in several respects: i) we show that UFG processes constitute a family of SDEs which exhibit, in general, multiple invariant measures (i.e. they are in general non-ergodic) and for which one is able to describe a systematic procedure to study the basin of attraction of each invariant measure (equilibrium state). ii) We use an explicit change of coordinates to prove that every UFG diffusion can be, at least locally, represented as a system consisting of an SDE coupled with an ODE, where the ODE evolves independently of the SDE part of the dynamics. iii) As a result, UFG diffusions are inherently “less smooth" than hypoelliptic SDEs; more precisely, we prove that UFG processes do not admit a density with respect to Lebesgue measure on the entire space, but only on suitable time-evolving submanifolds, which we describe. iv) We show that our results and techniques, which we devised for UFG processes, can be applied to the study of the long-time behaviour of non-autonomous hypoelliptic SDEs and therefore produce several results on this latter class of processes as well. v) Because processes that satisfy the (uniform) parabolic HC are UFG processes, this paper contains a wealth of results about the long time behaviour of (uniformly) hypoelliptic processes which are non-ergodic.