| dc.description.abstract | Kac’s d dimensional model gives a linear, many particle, binary collision model from which, under suitable conditions, the celebrated Boltzmann equation, in its spatially homogeneous form, arise as a mean field limit. The ergodicity of the evolution equation leads to questions about the relaxation rate, in hope that such a rate would pass on the Boltzmann equation as the number of particles goes to infinity. This program, starting with Kac and his one dimensional ‘Spectral Gap Conjecture’ at 1956, finally reached its conclusion in the Maxwellian case in a series of papers by authors such as Janvresse, Maslen, Carlen, Carvalho, Loss and Geronimo, but the hope to get a limiting relaxation rate for the Boltzmann equation with this linear method was already shown to be unrealistic (although the problem is still important and interesting due to its connection with the linearized Boltzmann operator). A less linear approach, via a many particle version of Cercignani’s conjecture, is the grounds for this paper. In our paper, we extend recent results by the author from the one dimensional Kac model to the d dimensional one, showing that the entropy-entropy production ratio, Γ N , still yields a very strong dependency in the number of particles of the problem when we consider the general case. | |
