On large deviations for particle systems associated with spatially homogeneous Boltzmann type equations (Q1346962)

The author proves the large deviation upper bound for the empirical process of an interacting particle system as the number \(N\) of particles tends to infinity. After treating a general particle system, the author specializes to the Boltzmann-McKean system \((X_i^N)_{1 \leq i \leq N}\), which is the probabilistic model for a spatially homogeneous Boltzmann-type equation and can be roughly described as follows: If \(z_i : = X_i^N (t)\) and \(z_j : = X_j^N(t)\) are the speeds of two different particles \(i,j \in \{1, \dots, N\}\) at time \(t \in [0,T]\), then the intensity, that they collide and change their speeds to \(z_i + \Delta\) and \(z_j + \Delta'\), is given by a (non-stochastic) collision kernel \({\mathcal L} (z_i, z_j; d(\Delta, \Delta'))\) on \((\mathbb{R}^d)^2 \backslash \{(0, 0)\}\), which respects the conservation of kinetic energy. Using Orlicz spaces and convex analysis, a nonvariational formulation of the rate function is proved in the second part of the paper. The main troubles in the proofs are the unbounded intensity of the jumps, their pairwise appearance and the degeneracy of \((X_i^N)_{1 \leq i \leq N}\) due to energy conservation. The results include the cases of hard spheres and Maxwellian molecules with a cutoff potential.