English

Conditional appearance of decay for the non-cutoff Boltzmann equation in a bounded domain

Analysis of PDEs 2026-04-28 v2

Abstract

This work is concerned with the generation of decay estimates in the velocity variable for solutions of the space-inhomogeneous Boltzmann equation without cutoff on a bounded spatial domain for hard and moderately soft potentials. We work with suitable weak solutions, provided that mass, energy and entropy density functions are under control. The following boundary conditions are treated: in-flow, bounce-back, specular reflection, diffuse reflection and Maxwell reflection. The notion of weak solutions relies on a family of Truncated Convex Inequalities that is inspired by the one recently introduced through F.~Golse, L.~Silvestre and the first author (2023) in the spatially homogeneous case. We show that the solutions generate some amount (up to d+1d+1) of pointwise polynomial velocity decay. In case of moderately soft potentials, we show that it is not possible to generate a decay higher than d+2d+2 if the energy is bounded.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.04368,
  title  = {Conditional appearance of decay for the non-cutoff Boltzmann equation in a bounded domain},
  author = {Cyril Imbert and Amélie Loher},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.04368},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

In the first version of this paper, the proof of generation of arbitrary polynomial decay (in the velocity variable) in the soft potential case contained a mistake. In this second version, we fix the proof and we provide a counter-example showing that only a limited polynomial decay can be generated