On the well-posedness of the spatially homogeneous Boltzmann equation with a moderate angular singularity

Rarefied gas flows, Boltzmann equation in fluid mechanics (76P05) Kinetic theory of gases in equilibrium statistical mechanics (82B40) Kinetic theory of gases in time-dependent statistical mechanics (82C40) Statistical mechanics of gases (82D05)

Abstract: We prove an inequality on the Kantorovich-Rubinstein distance --which can be seen as a particular case of a Wasserstein metric-- between two solutions of the spatially homogeneous Boltzmann equation without angular cutoff, but with a moderate angular singularity. Our method is in the spirit of [7]. We deduce some well-posedness and stability results in the physically relevant cases of hard and moderately soft potentials. In the case of hard potentials, we relax the regularity assumption of [6], but we need stronger assumptions on the tail of the distribution (namely some exponential decay). We thus obtain the first uniqueness result for measure initial data. In the case of moderately soft potentials, we prove existence and uniqueness assuming only that the initial datum has finite energy and entropy (for very moderately soft potentials), plus sometimes an additionnal moment condition. We thus improve significantly on all previous results, where weighted Sobolev spaces were involved.

Review text

A study about well-posedness of the spatially homogeneous Boltzmann equation for singular collision kernel is done. The authors focused on the questions of uniqueness and stability with respect to the initial condition which were open for collision kernel with angular cutoff. In the case of these kernels there are some uniqueness results but the case of collision kernels without cutoff it is much more difficult. This difficulty comes from the fundamental class of the interactions deriving from inverse power-law between particles -- the nature of the collision process lies between two cases: on each compact time interval, each particle collides with infinitely (resp. finitely) many others in the case without (resp. with) cutoff. The result obtained for non cutoff collision kernel concerned Maxwellian molecules. In the paper the authors extend and improve the method presented by \textit{N. Fournier} [J. Stat. Phys. 125, No. 4, 923--942 (2006; Zbl 1107.82045)) and thanks to their work it can deal with the physical collision kernels corresponding to hard and moderately soft potentials. They also simplified (in comparison to loc. cit.) the proof; now it is shorter, allows measure initial conditions and it does not refer anymore to probabilistic arguments. The authors compare their results with those presented by \textit{L. Desvillettes} and \textit{C. Mouhot} [Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal. 193, No. 2, 227--253 (2009; Zbl 1169.76054)]. When the approach is used in the case of an interaction potential \(V(s) = 1/r^s\) in dimension \(d=3\) it leads to the conclusions that the obtained results are much better in the case of moderately soft potentials (\(s\in (3,5)\)) and are different for the case of hard potentials (\(s\in (5,\infty)\)). However, the authors were only able to prove well-posedness in the case of a moderate angular singularity.

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