High-frequency limit of non-autonomous gradient flows of functionals with time-periodic forcing

We study the high-frequency limit of non-autonomous gradient flows in metric spaces of energy functionals comprising an explicitly time-dependent perturbation term which might oscillate in a rapid way. On grounds of the existence results by Ferreira and Guevara (2015) on non-autonomous gradient flows (which we also extend to a broader range of energy functionals), we prove that the associated solution curves converge to a solution of the time-averaged evolution equation in the limit of infinite frequency. Under additional assumptions on the energy, we obtain an explicit rate of convergence. Furthermore, we specifically investigate nonlinear drift-diffusion equations with time-dependent drift which formally are gradient flows with respect to the L-2-Wasserstein distance. We prove that a family of weak solutions obtained as a limit of the Minimizing Movements scheme exhibits the above-mentioned behavior in the high-frequency limit. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.