Global weak solutions to the relativistic Vlasov-Maxwell system revisited (Q815066): Difference between revisions

\textit{R. J. DiPerna} and \textit{P. L. Lions} [Commun. Pure Appl. Math., 42, No.~6, 729--757 (1989; Zbl 0698.35128)] has established the existence of global weak solutions for the Vlasov-Maxwell system (V.-M.s). The author presents a simplified version of this result but for the relativistic variant of this system. After a priori bounds resulting from conservation of energy and phase space volume by the characteristic flow of the Vlasov equation they introduce a regularized version of the system which has global in time smooth solutions. Given a sequence of solutions to the regularized V.-M.s along which the regularization vanishes in the limit it is shown that the a priori bounds hold uniformly. Then a weakly convergent subsequence is extracted as the candidate for the desired weak solution of the unmodified system. The main difficulty in passing to the limit in the nonlinear term of the V.-M.s is overcome by an additional compactness property of the approximating sequence, that is established in the velocity averaging lemma. The second problem lies in passing to the limit in moments \(f\) of particles density, \(\rho\) and \(j\) (spatial charge and current densities) since the relevant weights are not test functions. Their convergence is derived directly from a priori bounds for these quantities. Having obtained a weak solution the author examines some of its properties and shows that the weak solution preserves the total charge.