Despite the progress achieved by kinetic theory, the search of possible exact kinetic equations remains elusive to date. This concerns, specifically, the issue of the validity of the conjecture proposed by Grad (Grad, 1972) and developed in a seminal work by Lanford (Lanford, 1974) that kinetic equations - such as the Boltzmann equation for a gas of classical hard spheres - might result exact in an appropriate asymptotic limit, usually denoted as Boltzmann-Grad limit. The Lanford conjecture has actually had a profound influence on the scientific community, giving rise to a whole line of original research in kinetic theory and mathematical physics. Nevertheless, certain aspects of the theory remain to be addressed and clarified. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the possible existence of the strong Boltzmann-Grad limit for the BBGKY hierarchy. Contrary to previous approaches in which the w*-convergence was considered for the definition of the Boltzmann-Grad limit functions, based on their construction in terms of time-series expansions obtained from the BBGKY hierarchy, here we look for the possible existence of strong limit functions in the sense of local convergence in phase space. The result is based on the adoption of the Klimontovich approach to statistical mechanics, permitting the explicit representation of the $s$-body reduced distribution functions in terms of the Klimontovich probability density.
We review some results concerning the derivation of the Boltzmann equation starting from the many-body classical Hamiltonian dynamics. In particular, the celebrated paper by O. E. Lanford III and the more recent papers [13, 23] are discussed.
Review of From Newton to Boltzmann: Hard Spheres and Short-range Potentials, by Isabelle Gallagher, Laure Saint-Raymond and Benjamin Texier, European Mathematical Society, Zürich, 2014, xi+135 pp., ISBN 978-3- 03719-129-3.
In this paper, we rigorously derive a Boltzmann equation for mixtures from the many body dynamics of two types of hard sphere gases. We prove that the microscopic dynamics of two gases with different masses and diameters is well defined, and introduce the concept of a two parameter BBGKY hierarchy to handle the non-symmetric interaction of these gases. As a corollary of the derivation, we prove Boltzmann's propagation of chaos assumption for the case of a mixtures of gases.
Despite the progress achieved by kinetic theory, its rigorous theoretical foundations still remain unsolved to date. This concerns in particular the search of possible exact kinetic equations and, specifically, the conjecture proposed by Grad (Grad, 1972) and developed in a seminal work by Lanford (Lanford, 1974) that kinetic equations - such as the Boltzmann equation for a gas of classical hard spheres - might result exact in an appropriate asymptotic limit, usually denoted as Boltzmann-Grad limit. The Lanford conjecture has actually had a profound influence on the scientific community, givin…
We study space-time fluctuations of a hard sphere system at thermal equilibrium, and prove that the covariance converges to the solution of a linearized Boltzmann equation in the low density limit, globally in time. This result has been obtained previously in [7], by using uniform bounds on the number of recollisions of dispersing systems of hard spheres (as provided for instance in [9]). We present a self-contained proof with substantial differences, which does not use this geometric result. This can be regarded as the first step of a program aiming to derive the fluctuation theory of the rar…
In the paper the possible approaches to the rigorous derivation of the Boltzmann kinetic equation with hard sphere collisions from underlying dynamics are considered. In particular, a formalism for the description of the evolution of infinitely many hard spheres within the framework of marginal observables in the Boltzmann--Grad scaling limit is developed. Also we give consideration to one more approach of the description of the kinetic evolution of hard spheres in terms of a one-particle distribution function governed by the non-Markovian generalization of the Enskog equation and the Boltzman…
This paper provides the first rigorous derivation of a binary-ternary Boltzmann equation describing the kinetic properties of a dense hard-spheres gas, where particles undergo either binary or ternary instantaneous interactions, while preserving momentum and energy. An important challenge we overcome in deriving this equation is related to providing a mathematical framework that allows us to detect both binary and ternary interactions. Furthermore, this paper introduces new algebraic and geometric techniques in order to eventually decouple binary and ternary interactions and understand the way…
We consider the spatially homogeneous Boltzmann equation for inelastic hard spheres, in the framework of so-called constant normal restitution coefficients. We prove the existence of self-similar solutions, and we give pointwise estimates on their tail. We also give general estimates on the tail and the regularity of generic solutions. In particular we prove Haff 's law on the rate of decay of temperature, as well as the algebraic decay of singularities. The proofs are based on the regularity study of a rescaled problem, with the help of the regularity properties of the gain part of the Boltzm…
N.N. Bogolyubov discovered that the Boltzmann-Enskog kinetic equation has microscopic solutions. They have the form of sums of delta-functions and correspond to trajectories of individual hard spheres. But the rigorous sense of the product of the delta-functions in the collision integral was not discussed. Here we give a rigorous sense to these solutions by introduction of a special regularization of the delta-functions. The crucial observation is that the collision integral of the Boltzmann-Enskog equation coincides with that of the first equation of the BBGKY hierarchy for hard spheres if th…
In this paper we present a rigorous derivation of the Boltzmann equation in a compact domain with diffuse reflection boundary conditions. We consider a system of $N$ hard spheres of diameter $ε$ in a box $Λ:= [0, 1] \times (R/Z)^2$. When a particle meets the boundary of the domain, it is instantaneously reinjected into the box with a random direction, and conserving kinetic energy. We prove that the first marginal of the process converges in the scaling $Nε^2 = 1$, $ε\rightarrow 0$ to the solution of the Boltzmann equation, with the same short time restriction of Lanford's classical theorem.
We develop the Cauchy theory of the spatially homogeneous inelastic Boltzmann equation for hard spheres, for a general form of collision rate which includes in particular variable restitution coefficients depending on the kinetic energy and the relative velocity as well as the sticky particles model. We prove (local in time) non-concentration estimates in Orlicz spaces, from which we deduce weak stability and existence theorem. Strong stability together with uniqueness and instantaneous appearance of exponential moments are proved under additional smoothness assumption on the initial datum, fo…
We present a mathematical theory of dynamical fluctuations for the hard sphere gas in the Boltzmann-Grad limit. We prove that: (1) fluctuations of the empirical measure from the solution of the Boltzmann equation, scaled with the square root of the average number of particles, converge to a Gaussian process driven by the fluctuating Boltzmann equation, as predicted in [67]; (2) large deviations are exponentially small in the average number of particles and are characterized, under regularity assumptions, by a large deviation functional as previously obtained in [61] for dynamics with stochasti…
We study the macroscopic transport properties of the quantum Lorentz gas in a crystal with short-range potentials, and show that in the Boltzmann-Grad limit the quantum dynamics converges to a random flight process which is not compatible with the linear Boltzmann equation. Our derivation relies on a hypothesis concerning the statistical distribution of lattice points in thin domains, which is closely related to the Berry-Tabor conjecture in quantum chaos.
In this paper, we provide the first rigorous derivation of hydrodynamic equations from the Boltzmann equation for inelastic hard spheres with small inelasticity. The hydrodynamic system that we obtain is an incompressible Navier-Stokes-Fourier system with self-consistent forcing terms and is thus the first hydrodynamic system that properly describes rapid granular flows. To do that, we write our Boltzmann equation in nondimensional form introducing the dimensionless Knudsen number which is intended to tend to 0. The difficulties are then manyfold, the first one coming from the fact that the or…
We introduce a gradient flow formulation of linear Boltzmann equations. Under a diffusive scaling we derive a diffusion equation by using the machinery of gradient flows.
The Boltzmann-Enskog equation for a hard sphere gas is known to have so called microscopic solutions, i.e., solutions of the form of time-evolving empirical measures of a finite number of hard spheres. However, the precise mathematical meaning of these solutions should be discussed, since the formal substitution of empirical measures into the equation is not well-defined. Here we give a rigorous mathematical meaning to the microscopic solutions to the Boltzmann-Enskog equation by means of a suitable series representation.
In this paper the problem is posed of the prescription of the so-called Boltzmann-Grad (BG) limit ($\mathcal{L}_{BG}$) for the $N-$body system of smooth hard-spheres which undergo unary, binary as well as multiple elastic instantaneous collisions. The statistical description is couched in terms of the Master kinetic equation, i.e., the kinetic equation which realizes the axiomatic "\textit{ab initio}" approach to the classical statistical mechanics of finite hard-sphere systems recently developed (Tessarotto \textit{et al.}, 2013-2017). The issue addressed here concerns the prescription of the…
The inconsistency between the time-reversible Liouville equation and time-irreversible Boltzmann equation has been pointed out long ago by Loschmidt. To avoid Loschmidt's objection, here we propose a new dynamical system to model the motion of atoms of gas, with their interactions triggered by a random point process. Despite being random, this model can approximate the collision dynamics of rigid spheres via adjustable parameters. We compute the exact statistical steady state of the system, and determine the form of its marginal distributions for a large number of spheres. We find that the Kul…
We present a quantitative analysis of the Boltzmann-Grad (low-density) limit of a hard sphere system. We introduce and study a set of functions (correlation errors) measuring the deviations in time from the statistical independence of particles (propagation of chaos). In the context of the BBGKY hierarchy, a correlation error of order $k$ measures the event where $k$ particles are connected by a chain of interactions preventing the factorization. We show that, provided $k < \varepsilon^{-α}$, such an error flows to zero with the average density $\varepsilon$, for short times, as $\varepsilon^{…
The relativistic Boltzmann equation for a constant differential cross section and with periodic boundary conditions is considered. The speed of light appears as a parameter $c>c_0$ for a properly large and positive $c_0$. A local existence and uniqueness theorem is proved in an interval of time independent of $c>c_0$ and conditions are given such that in the limit $c\to +\infty$ the solutions converge, in a suitable norm, to the solutions of the non-relativistic Boltzmann equation for hard spheres.
We show that deletion of the loss part of the collision term in all physically relevant versions of the Boltzmann equation, including the relativistic case, will in general lead to blowup in finite time of a solution and hence prevent global existence. Our result corrects an error in the proof given in Ref. [12], where the result was announced for the classical hard sphere case; here we give a simpler proof which applies much more generally.
We study the dynamics of a point particle in a periodic array of spherical scatterers, and construct a stochastic process that governs the time evolution for random initial data in the limit of low scatterer density (Boltzmann-Grad limit). A generic path of the limiting process is a piecewise linear curve whose consecutive segments are generated by a Markov process with memory two.
It has been known since Lanford [19] that the dynamics of a hard sphere gas is described in the low density limit by the Boltzmann equation, at least for short times. The classical strategy of proof fails for longer times, even close to equilibrium. In this paper, we introduce a duality method coupled with a pruning argument to prove that the covariance of the fluctuations around equilibrium is governed by the linearized Boltzmann equation globally in time (including in diffusive regimes). This method is much more robust and simple than the one devised in [4] which was specific to the 2D case.
We review various contributions on the fundamental work of Lanford deriving the Boltzmann equation from hard-sphere dynamics in the low density limit. We focus especially on the assumptions made on the initial data and on how they encode irreversibility. The impossibility to reverse time in the Boltzmann equation (expressed for instance by Boltzmann's H-theorem) is related to the lack of convergence of higher order marginals on some singular sets. Explicit counterexamples single out the microscopic sets where the initial data should converge in order to produce the Boltzmann dynamics.
We study a system of charged, noninteracting classical particles moving in a Poisson distribution of hard-disk scatterers in two dimensions, under the effect of a magnetic field perpendicular to the plane. We prove that, in the low-density (Boltzmann-Grad) limit, the particle distribution evolves according to a generalized linear Boltzmann equation, previously derived and solved by Bobylev et al. [4, 5, 6]. In this model, Boltzmann's chaos fails, and the kinetic equation includes non-Markovian terms. The ideas of [13] can be however adapted to prove convergence of the process with memory.
In this article, I study the diffusive behavior for a quantum test particle interacting with a dilute background gas. The model I begin with is a reduced picture for the test particle dynamics given by a quantum linear Boltzmann equation in which the gas particle scattering is assumed to occur through a hard-sphere interaction. The state of the particle is represented by a density matrix that evolves according to a translation-covariant Lindblad equation. The main result is a proof that the particle's position distribution converges to a Gaussian under diffusive rescaling.
Derivation of the Boltzmann equation from hard-sphere dynamics (after Y. Deng, Z. Hani, and X. Ma)
I.H.E.S., Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS Laboratoire Alexandre Grothendieck（高等科学研究所，巴黎萨克雷大学，法国国家科学研究中心亚历山大·格罗滕迪克实验室）；Université Paris Cité, Sorbonne Université CNRS, IMJ-PRG（巴黎西岱大学，索邦大学法国国家科学研究中心，IMJ-PRG）；Sapienza Università di Roma Dipartimento di Matematica G. Castelnuovo（罗马智慧大学，G.卡斯特鲁诺沃数学系）
本文基于 Deng、Hani 和 Ma 的工作，推导了从硬球动力学到玻尔兹曼方程的收敛性结果，并解释了其证明中的关键要素。
We introduce a numerical method for solving Grad's moment equations or regularized moment equations for arbitrary order of moments. In our algorithm, we do not need explicitly the moment equations. As an instead, we directly start from the Boltzmann equation and perform Grad's moment method \cite{Grad} and the regularization technique \cite{Struchtrup2003} numerically. We define a conservative projection operator and propose a fast implementation which makes it convenient to add up two distributions and provides more efficient flux calculations compared with the classic method using explicit e…
We study the Boltzmann equation for a mixture of two gases in one space dimension with initial condition of one gas near vacuum and the other near a Maxwellian equilibrium state. A qualitative-quantitative mathematical analysis is developed to study this mass diffusion problem based on the Green's function of the Boltzmann equation for the single species hard sphere collision model as developed in work of Liu and Yu. The cross species resonance of the mass diffusion and the diffusion-sound wave is investigated. An exponentially sharp global solution is obtained.
In [7], a cluster expansion method has been developed to study the fluctuations of the hard sphere dynamics around the Boltzmann equation. This method provides a precise control on the exponential moments of the empirical measure, from which the fluctuating Boltzmann equation and large deviation estimates have been deduced. The cluster expansion in [7] was implemented at the level of the BBGKY hierarchy, which is a standard tool to investigate the deterministic dynamics [11]. In this paper, we introduce an alternative approach, in which the cluster expansion is applied directly on real traject…
The article discusses some of the latest advances in the mathematical understanding of the nature of kinetic equations that describe the collective behavior of many-particle systems with collisional dynamics.
The dynamics of a point particle in a periodic array of spherical scatterers converges, in the limit of small scatterer size, to a random flight process, whose paths are piecewise linear curves generated by a Markov process with memory two. The corresponding transport equation is distinctly different from the linear Boltzmann equation observed in the case of a random configuration of scatterers. In the present paper we provide asymptotic estimates for the transition probabilities of this Markov process. Our results in particular sharpen previous upper and lower bounds on the distribution of fr…
We consider the rate of convergence of solutions of spatially inhomogenous Boltzmann equations, with hard sphere potentials, to some equilibriums, called Maxwellians. Maxwellians are spatially homogenous static Maxwell velocity distributions with different temperatures and mean velocities. We study solutions in weighted space $L^{1}(\mathbb{R}^{3}\times \mathbb{T}^3)$. We prove a conjecture of C. Villani: assume the solution is sufficiently localized and sufficiently smooth, then the solution, in $L^{1}$-space, converges to a Maxwellian, exponentially fast in time.
We study a hard sphere gas at equilibrium, and prove that in the low density limit, the fluctuations converge to a Gaussian process governed by the fluctuating Boltzmann equation. This result holds for arbitrarily long times. The method of proof builds upon the weak convergence method introduced in the companion paper [8] which is improved by considering clusters of pseudo-trajectories as in [7].
A linear Boltzmann equation is derived in the Boltzmann-Grad scaling for the deterministic dynamics of many interacting particles with random initial data. We study a Rayleigh gas where a tagged particle is undergoing hard-sphere collisions with background particles, which do not interact among each other. In the Boltzmann-Grad scaling, we derive the validity of a linear Boltzmann equation for arbitrary long times under moderate assumptions on higher moments of the initial distributions of the tagged particle and the possibly non-equilibrium distribution of the background. The convergence of t…
The periodic Lorentz gas is the dynamical system corresponding to the free motion of a point particle in a periodic system of fixed spherical obstacles of radius $r$ centered at the integer points, assuming all collisions of the particle with the obstacles to be elastic. In this Note, we study this motion on time intervals of order $1/r$ and in the limit as $r\to 0^+$, in the case of two space dimensions.
For the spatially homogeneous Boltzmann equation with hard po- tentials and Grad's cutoff (e.g. hard spheres), we give quantitative estimates of exponential convergence to equilibrium, and we show that the rate of exponential decay is governed by the spectral gap for the linearized equation, on which we provide a lower bound. Our approach is based on establishing spectral gap-like estimates valid near the equilibrium, and then connecting the latter to the quantitative nonlinear theory. This leads us to an explicit study of the linearized Boltzmann collision operator in functional spaces larger…
In a microcanonical ensemble (constant $NVE$, hard reflecting walls) and in a molecular dynamics ensemble (constant $NVE\mathbf{PG}$, periodic boundary conditions) with a number $N$ of smooth elastic hard spheres in a $d$-dimensional volume $V$ having a total energy $E$, a total momentum $\mathbf{P}$, and an overall center of mass position $\mathbf{G}$, the individual velocity components, velocity moduli, and energies have transformed beta distributions with different arguments and shape parameters depending on $d$, $N$, $E$, the boundary conditions, and possible symmetries in the initial cond…
In earlier work we showed that the particle displacement for the multidimensional periodic Lorentz gas, in the limit of low scatterer density (Boltzmann-Grad limit), satisfies a central limit theorem with superdiffusive scaling. The present paper extends this result to a functional central limit theorem, i.e., the weak convergence of the particle trajectory to Brownian motion.
Higher regularity estimate has been a challenging question for the Boltzmann equation in bounded domains. Indeed, it is well-known to have "the non-existence of a second order derivative at the boundary" in [15] even for symmetric convex domains such as a disk or sphere. In this paper we answer this question in the affirmative by constructing the $C^{1,β}$ solutions away from the grazing boundary, for any $β<1$, to the stationary Boltzmann equation with the non-isothermal diffuse boundary condition in strictly convex domains, as long as a smooth wall temperature has small fluctuation pointwise…
We address a question raised in the work of Gallagher, Saint-Raymond and Texier (From Newton to Boltzmann: Hard Spheres and Short-range Potentials, Zürich Lectures in Advanced Mathematics, EMS, 2013) that concerns the convergence of soft-potential dynamics to hard sphere dynamics. In the case of two particles, we establish that hard sphere dynamics is the limit of soft sphere dynamics in the weak-star topology of BV. We view our result as establishing a topological method by which to construct weak solutions to the ODE of hard sphere motion.
We prove that the evolution of marginals associated to the empirical measure of a finite system of hard spheres is driven by the BBGKY hierarchical expansion. The usual hierarchy of equations for $L^1$ measures is obtained as a corollary. We discuss the ambiguities arising in the corresponding notion of microscopic series solution to the Boltzmann-Enskog equation.
We consider a classical system of point particles interacting by means of a short range potential. We prove that, in the low--density (Boltzmann--Grad) limit, the system behaves, for short times, as predicted by the associated Boltzmann equation. This is a revisitation and an extension of the thesis of King (unpublished), appeared after the well known result of Lanford for hard spheres, and of a recent paper by Gallagher et al (arXiv: 1208.5753v1). Our analysis applies to any stable and smooth potential. In the case of repulsive potentials (with no attractive parts), we estimate explicitly the…
We study the acoustic limit from the Boltzmann equation in the framework of classical solutions. For a solution $F_\varepsilon=μ+\varepsilon \sqrtμf_\varepsilon$ to the rescaled Boltzmann equation in the acoustic time scaling \partial_t F_\varepsilon +\vgrad F_\varepsilon =\frac{1}{\varepsilon} \Q(F_\varepsilon,F_\varepsilon), inside a periodic box $\mathbb{T}^3$, we establish the global-in-time uniform energy estimates of $f_\varepsilon$ in $\varepsilon$ and prove that $f_\varepsilon$ converges strongly to $f$ whose dynamics is governed by the acoustic system. The collision kernel $\Q$ includ…
We resume the investigation, started in arXiv:1408.6571, of the statistics of backward clusters in a gas of $N$ hard spheres of small diameter $\varepsilon$. A backward cluster is defined as the group of particles involved directly or indirectly in the backwards-in-time dynamics of a given tagged sphere. We obtain an estimate of the average cardinality of clusters with respect to the equilibrium measure, global in time, uniform in $\varepsilon, N$ for $\varepsilon^2 N=1$ (Boltzmann-Grad regime).
We prove explicit coercivity estimates for the linearized Boltzmann and Landau operators, for a general class of interactions including any inverse-power law interactions, and hard spheres. The functional spaces of these coercivity estimates depend on the collision kernel of these operators. They cover the spectral gap estimates for the linearized Boltzmann operator with Maxwell molecules, improve these estimates for hard potentials, and are the first explicit coercivity estimates for soft potentials (including in particular the case of Coulombian interactions). We also prove a regularity prop…
Kinetic Theory and the Mechanics of Isothermal Gas Spheres: Derivation of the Classical Emden--Chandrasekhar Equation via the Vlasov--Poisson Formalism
We consider the spatially inhomogeneous Boltzmann equation for inelastic hard-spheres, with constant restitution coefficient $α\in(0,1)$, under the thermalization induced by a host medium with a fixed Maxwellian distribution and any fixed $e\in(0,1]$. When the restitution coefficient $α$ is close to 1 we prove existence and uniqueness of global solutions considering the close-to-equilibrium regime. We also study the long-time behaviour of these solutions and prove a convergence to equilibrium with an exponential rate.
