Kac's program in kinetic theory (Q358823)

By the authors this paper is an attempt to develop a quantitative theory of mean-field limit which strongly relies on detailed knowledge of the nonlinear limit equation, rather than on detailed properties of the many-particle Markov process. The main outcome of this theory will be to find quantitative estimates to the propagation of chaos that are uniform in time, as well as propagation of entropic chaos. It is also proved estimates on the relaxation rates, measured in the Wasserstein distance and relative entropy, that are independent of the number of particles. All this is done for the two important, realistic and archetypal models of collision with unbounded collision rates, namely hard spheres and the true (i.e. without cutoff) Maxwell molecules. The authors classify the results established into three main statements: (1) Quantitative uniform in time propagation of chaos, finite or infinite dimensional, in weak measure distance (2) Propagation of entropic chaos (3) Quantitative estimates on relaxation times, independent of the number of particles