The massless Boltzmann equation in Minkowski spacetime
Analysis of PDEs
2026-06-29 v1 Mathematical Physics
Abstract
We study the spatially homogeneous, massless Boltzmann equation in Minkowski spacetime for a certain range of hard and soft interactions. For hard interactions, we derive a Povzner-type inequality for massless particles and show that solutions exist for all time into the future. For soft interactions, we employ singular weights to control singularities at , which arise from the masslessness of particles, to obtain local existence. These results, which are among rather few proofs of existence for the massless Boltzmann equation, are motivated by our earlier work on the massless Einstein--Boltzmann system in certain cosmological settings.
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Cite
@article{arxiv.2606.30437,
title = {The massless Boltzmann equation in Minkowski spacetime},
author = {Ho Lee and Ernesto Nungesser and John Stalker and Paul Tod},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.30437},
year = {2026}
}
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13 pages