On the self-similar asymptotics for generalized nonlinear kinetic Maxwell models (Q1048116)

The central motivation of this paper is to explore Maxwell-type kinetic models -- i.e. with collision-frequency independent of the velocities of the colliding particles -- from a very general point of view -- covering inelastic, binary and multiple collisions, single gases or mixtures, multilinear models -- in order to establish the key properties that lead to self-similar asymptotic behaviours for long times. Indeed, the latter behaviour is found in models which qualitatively describe many different applications in physics, dynamics of granular gases, economics, etc, but their solutions share many mathematical aspects. In the present paper such models are considered from a very general point of view, including those with arbitrary polynomial non-linearities and in any dimension space. It is shown that the whole class of generalized Maxwell models satisfies properties one of which can be interpreted as an operator generalization of usual Lipschitz conditions. This property is shown to be the essential aspect and constitutes the basis for the general theory formulated in this paper. It is shown that the L-Lipschitz condition leads to self-similar asymptotics provided the corresponding self-similar solution does exist. This result is considered by the authors as the main theorem for general Maxwell-type models. This allows to describe in detail a behaviour of solutions to the corresponding initial value problem. In particular, it is shown in the most general case an existence and uniqueness of self similar solutions. General properties of the self-similar solutions, such as positivity or power-like tails are studied. It is studied the convergence, in the sense of probability measures, of dynamically scaled solutions to the Cauchy problem to those self-similar solutions, as time goes to infinity. A new application of multi-linear models to economics and social dynamics is discussed, in which the phase variables are goods -- money, wealth -- and the particles are players. The intuitive idea is that a scaling transformation of the phase variable -- for instance, a change of currency -- does not influence the behaviour of the players. Under these conditions it is shown that the general theory can predict a time-dependent distribution of wealth among participants of economic games with simple rules and arbitrary number of players.