Determination of the Spectral Gap in the Kac Model for Physical Momentum and Energy-Conserving Collisions

DOI10.1137/070695423zbMATH Open1163.82007arXiv0705.3729OpenAlexW2160048513MaRDI QIDQ3609049FDOQ3609049

Authors: Jeffrey S. Geronimo, Michael Loss, Eric Carlen 

Publication date: 6 March 2009

Published in: SIAM Journal on Mathematical Analysis (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: The Kac model describes the local evolution of a gas of $N$ particles with three dimensional velocities by a random walk in which the steps correspond to binary collisions that conserve momentum as well as energy. The state space of this walk is a sphere of dimension $3N-4$. The Kac conjecture concerns the spectral gap in the one step transition operator $Q$ for this walk. In this paper, we compute the exact spectral gap. As in previous work by Carlen, Carvalho and Loss where a lower bound on the spectral gap was proved, we use a method that relates the spectral properties of $Q$ to the spectral properties of a simpler operator $P$, which is simply an average of certain non commuting projections. The new feature is that we show how to use a knowledge of certain eigenfunctions and eigenvalues of $P$ to determine spectral properties of $Q$, instead of simply using the spectral gap for $P$ to bound the spectral gap for $Q$, inductively in $N$, as in previous work. The methods developed here can be applied to many other high--dimensional stochastic process, as we shall explain. We also use some deep results on Jacobi polynomials to obtain the required spectral information on $P$, and we show how the identity through which Jacobi polynomials enter our problem may be used to obtain new bounds on Jacobi polynomials.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/0705.3729

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zbMATH Keywords

orthogonal polynomialsspectral gapKac model

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Generalized hypergeometric series, ({}_pF_q) (33C20) Kinetic theory of gases in time-dependent statistical mechanics (82C40) Rarefied gas flows, Boltzmann equation in fluid mechanics (76P05)

Cited In (16)

• Kac's program in kinetic theory
• A lower bound for the spectral gap of the conjugate Kac process with 3 interacting particles
• Spectral gap for the Kac model with hard sphere collisions
• Spectral gaps for reversible Markov processes with chaotic invariant measures: the Kac process with hard sphere collisions in three dimensions
• Derivation of a Boltzmann equation with higher-order collisions from a generalized Kac model
• Proof of a McKean conjecture on the rate of convergence of Boltzmann-equation solutions
• Total variation bound for Kac's random walk
• On the Markov sequence problem for Jacobi polynomials
• Determination of the spectral gap for Kac's master equation and related stochastic evolution.
• Equilibrium fluctuation for an anharmonic chain with boundary conditions in the Euler scaling limit
• On the spectral gap of the Kac walk and other binary collision processes
• A counter example to Cercignani's conjecture for the \(d\) dimensional Kac model
• The Kac model coupled to a thermostat
• Global spectral gap for Dirichlet-Kac random motions
• Entropy production inequalities for the Kac walk
• Kac's chaos and Kac's program

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