Propagation of chaos for topological interactions

Abstract: We consider a $N$-particle model describing an alignment mechanism due to a topological interaction among the agents. We show that the kinetic equation, expected to hold in the mean-field limit $N \to \infty$, as following from the previous analysis in [A. Blanchet, P. Degond, Topological interactions in a Boltzmann-type framework, J. Stat. Phys., 163 (2016), pp. 41-60.] can be rigorously derived. This means that the statistical independence (propagation of chaos) is indeed recovered in the limit, provided it is assumed at time zero.