Equilibria of homogeneous functionals in the fair-competition regime

We consider macroscopic descriptions of particles where repulsion is modelled by non-linear power-law diffusion and attraction by a homogeneous singular/non-singular kernel leading to variants of the Keller-Segel model of chemotaxis. We analyse the regime in which both homogeneities scale the same with respect to dilations, that we coin as fair-competition. In the singular kernel case, we show that existence of global equilibria can only happen at a certain critical value and they are characterised as optimisers of a variant of HLS inequalities. We also study the existence of self-similar solutions for the sub-critical case, or equivalently of optimisers of rescaled free energies. These optimisers are shown to be compactly supported radially symmetric and non-increasing stationary solutions of the non-linear Keller-Segel equation. On the other hand, we show that no radially symmetric non-increasing stationary solutions exist in the non-singular kernel case, implying that there is no criticality. However, we show the existence of positive self-similar solutions for all values of the parameter under the condition that diffusion is not too fast. We finally illustrate some of the open problems in the non-singular kernel case by numerical experiments.