Validity and failure of the Boltzmann approximation of kinetic annihilation (Q610700)

A continuum description of deterministic hard ball systems is addressed under a simplification of a kinetic annihilation which keeps two central features of the original (Boltzmann) evolution: the randomness of an initial state and the deterministic evolution. The transport term can be dropped by considering spatially homogeneous initial data with finite total mass end kinetic energy, that in addition do not concentrate mass on single velocity directions. The central question of the paper is whether for the small particle size (scaling limits) the many-body evolution can be described by the gainless Boltzmann equation. Its validity is established in a suitable probabilistic sense. A key element is a characterization of the many-particle flow by a hierarchy of trees which encode the possible collisions. The restriction to a finite number of interacting particles is found justified which enables one to extract a single-body distribution.