  The purpose of this work is to introduce a notion of weak solution to the
master equation of a potential mean field game and to prove that existence and
uniqueness hold under quite general assumptions. Remarkably, this is achieved
without any monotonicity constraint on the coefficients. The key point is to
interpret the master equation in a conservative sense and then to adapt to the
infinite dimensional setting earlier arguments for hyperbolic systems deriving
from a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation. Here, the master equation is indeed
regarded as an infinite dimensional system set on the space of probability
measures and is formally written as the derivative of the
Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation associated with the mean field control problem
lying above the mean field game. To make the analysis easier, we assume that
the coefficients are periodic, which allows to represent probability measures
through their Fourier coefficients. Most of the analysis then consists in
rewriting the master equation and the corresponding Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman
equation for the mean field control problem as partial differential equations
set on the Fourier coefficients themselves. In the end, we establish existence
and uniqueness of functions that are displacement semi-concave in the measure
argument and that solve the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation in a suitable
generalized sense and, subsequently, we get existence and uniqueness of
functions that solve the master equation in an appropriate weak sense and that
satisfy a weak one-sided Lipschitz inequality. As another new result, we also
prove that the optimal trajectories of the associated mean field control
problem are unique for almost every starting point, for a suitable probability
measure on the space of probability measures.
