The Vlasov-Poisson-Boltzmann system in the whole space: The hard potential case (Q424456)

The purpose of this paper is to study the existence of solutions to the Cauchy problem for the Vlasov-Poisson-Boltzmann system in the neighborhood of a global Maxwellian. The equations under consideration in all of phase space are \[ \partial_t f + \xi \cdot \nabla_x f + \nabla_x \phi \cdot \nabla_{\xi} f = Q(f,f), \;\;\; f(0,x,\xi) = f_0(x,\xi), \tag{1} \] in which \(x \in \mathbb R^3\), \(\xi \in \mathbb R^3\) and \(\phi\) is the internally consistent solution to the Poisson equation. The collision operator \(Q\) takes the form \[ Q(f,f) = \int\int_{R^3 \times S^2}|\xi - \xi_*|^{\gamma} q_0(\theta) \{ f(\xi_*')g(\xi') - f(\xi_*)g(\xi) \} d \omega d\xi_*, \tag{2} \] where \(\xi' = \xi - [(\xi-\xi_*) \cdot \omega]\omega,\;\; \xi_*' = \xi_* + [(\xi-\xi_*) \cdot \omega]\omega, \;\; \omega \in S^2\). The analysis focuses on the case of hard potentials for which \(0 \leq \gamma \leq 1\) in (2) and with Grad's angular cutoff assumption. Let \({\mathbf M} = (2\pi)^{-3/2} e^{-|\xi|^2/2}\) be the normalized Maxwellian. The analysis proceeds by writing equations (1), (2) in terms of a standard perturbation \(u\) such that \(f-{\mathbf M} = {\mathbf M} ^{1/2}u\). The goal then is to prove the global existence of the solution \(u\) to the reformulated system. A number of papers have been written on this subject in recent years; however, as the authors point out, these previous works deal only with the hard-sphere model for which \(\gamma = 1\) in (2). A new development in the present paper is to address the problem of the existence of solutions for general hard potentials for which \(0 \leq \gamma \leq 1\). A method employed to solve the problem is to introduce a time-velocity weight function \(w_l(t,\xi) = \langle \xi \rangle ^{l/2}e^{\frac{\lambda |\xi|}{(1+t)^{\theta}}}\) where \(l \in \mathbb R\), \(\lambda > 0\), \(\theta > 0\) and \(\langle \xi \rangle = (1+|\xi|^2) ^{1/2}\). A temporal energy norm is defined as \[ |||u|||_{N,l}(t) = \sum_{|\alpha|+|\beta| \leq N} \|w_l(t,\xi) \partial_{\beta}^{\alpha}u(t)\| + \|\nabla_x \phi(t)\|_{H^N}. \] The main result of the paper is a theorem which guarantees that if the initial data \(u(0,\cdot) = u_0\) is sufficiently differentiable and within a small parameter \(\epsilon_0\) of zero then the reformulated VPB system has a unique global solution \(u(t,x,\xi)\) such that \[ \mathrm{sup}_{t \geq 0} \{(1+t)^{3/4} |||u|||_{N,l}(t) \} \leq C\epsilon_0. \] It follows that equations (1), (2) have a unique global solution for which \(f(t,x,\xi) \rightarrow {\mathbf M}\) as \(t \rightarrow \infty\).