Diffusiophoresis as a mechanism to study human population migration patterns

Drawing inspiration from diffusiophoresis in colloids and chemotaxis in a bacteria, we propose that human populations exhibit a similar migratory behavior, albeit on significantly larger timescales and length-scales, driven by gradients of ”attractants” such as economic opportunities, political viewpoints, and safety, among other factors. To explore this idea, we present a novel reaction-diffusion-migration (RDM) framework, which produces features not achievable through reaction-diffusion alone. We study different attractant landscape scenarios such as externally driven, autocatalytic driven and feedback driven. We observe novel features arising from the RDM framework such as negative diffusion tendencies of populations to cluster around a hotspot, highly segregated population distributions and traveling wave solutions. We discuss the potential of the RDM framework in elucidating broader patterns of population migration and the emergence of hotspots.

References: Alessio and Gupta arxiv 2023, Alessio and Gupta under prep