A CONSISTENCY ESTIMATE FOR KAC'S MODEL OF ELASTIC COLLISIONS IN A DILUTE GAS

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Norris, James
• 署名单位: University of Cambridge
• 刊物名称: ANNALS OF APPLIED PROBABILITY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1050-5164
• DOI: 10.1214/15-AAP1111
• 发表日期: 2016
• 页码: 1029-1081
• 关键词: homogeneous boltzmann-equation; STABILITY

摘要

An explicit estimate is derived for Kac's mean-field model of colliding hard spheres, which compares, in a Wasserstein distance, the empirical velocity distributions for two versions of the model based on different numbers of particles. For suitable initial data, with high probability, the two processes agree to within a tolerance of order N-1/d, where N is the smaller particle number and d is the dimension, provided that d >= 3. From this estimate we can deduce that the spatially homogeneous Boltzmann equation is well posed in a class of measure-valued processes and provides a good approximation to the Kac process when the number of particles is large. We also prove in an appendix a basic lemma on the total variation of time-integrals of time dependent signed measures.