Structure-Preserving Detailed-Balance Master-Equation Discretizations for Fokker--Planck Equations

We develop a variational--Markov construction of detailed-balance master-equation discretizations for Fokker--Planck equations directly from their energy--dissipation laws. Rather than discretizing the differential operator, we represent mass transfer between neighboring grid points by two directional jump rates. On each edge, the discrete energy--dissipation law determines the net flux, while detailed balance fixes the rate ratio; a local reconstruction of edge quantities from neighboring grid-point values then uniquely determines both rates. A logarithmic-mean reconstruction recovers the classical Scharfetter--Gummel/Wang--Peskin--Elston rates, while alternative reconstructions yield other reversible schemes. The resulting semi-discrete systems conserve mass, preserve nonnegativity, satisfy detailed balance, and dissipate a discrete free energy. The same edgewise construction extends to state-dependent and degenerate mobilities, nonlocal interaction energies and higher-dimensional problems. The corresponding implicit and semi-implicit fully discrete schemes are linear, mass-conservative, positivity-preserving, and energy-stable, with a time-step restriction required only for nonlocal interaction energies whose kernel is not negative semidefinite. Numerical experiments confirm the expected spatial convergence rates of all detailed-balance schemes and verify their equilibrium accuracy, positivity preservation, and free-energy decay with discontinuous potentials, saturation, nonlocal interactions, and two-dimensional problems.