We establish a priori upper bounds for solutions to the spatially inhomogeneous Landau equation in the case of moderately soft potentials, with arbitrary initial data, under the assumption that mass, energy and entropy densities stay under control. Our pointwise estimates decay polynomially in the velocity variable. We also show that if the initial data satisfies a Gaussian upper bound, this bound is propagated for all positive times.
Classical solutions for have so far only been constructed in a close-to-equilibrium setting: see the work of Guo @cite_7 and Mouhot-Neumann @cite_1 . A suitable notion of weak solution, for general initial data, was constructed by Alexandre-Villani @cite_15 @cite_14 .
@cite_15 @cite_14 @cite_1 @cite_7
1989465898 1990233096 2039481916
Abstract This paper studies the approximation of the Boltzmann equation by the Landau equation in a regime when grazing collisions prevail. While all previous results in the subject were limited to the spatially homogeneous case, here we manage to cover the general, space-dependent situation, assuming only basic physical estimates of finite mass, energy, entropy and entropy production. The proofs are based on the recent results and methods introduced previously in [R. Alexandre, C. Villani, Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 55 (1) (2002) 30–70] by both authors, and the entropy production smoothing effects established in [R. , Arch. Rational Mech. Anal. 152 (4) (2000) 327–355]. We are able to treat realistic singularities of Coulomb type, and approximations of the Debye cut. However, our method only works for finite-time intervals, while the Landau equation is supposed to describe long-time corrections to the Vlasov–Poisson equation. If the mean-field interaction is neglected, then our results apply to physically relevant situations after a time rescaling. For a general class of linear collisional kinetic models in the torus, including in particular the linearized Boltzmann equation for hard spheres, the linearized Landau equation with hard and moderately soft potentials and the semi-classical linearized fermionic and bosonic relaxation models, we prove explicit coercivity estimates on the associated integro-differential operator for some modified Sobolev norms. We deduce the existence of classical solutions near equilibrium for the full nonlinear models associated with explicit regularity bounds, and we obtain explicit estimates on the rate of exponential convergence towards equilibrium in this perturbative setting. The proof is based on a linear energy method which combines the coercivity property of the collision operator in the velocity space with transport effects, in order to deduce coercivity estimates in the whole phase space. The Landau equation, which was proposed by Landau in 1936, is a fundamental equation to describe collisions among charged particles interacting with their Coulombic force. In this article, global in time classical solutions near Maxwellians are constructed for the Landau equation in a periodic box. Our result also covers a class of generalized Landau equations, which describes grazing collisions in a dilute gas.