Kac's Program in Kinetic Theory

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the study of propagation of chaos and mean-field limits for systems of indistinguable particles, undergoing collision processes. The prime examples we will consider are the many-particle jump processes of Kac and McKean \cite{Kac1956,McKean1967} giving rise to the Boltzmann equation. We solve the conjecture raised by Kac \cite{Kac1956}, motivating his program, on the rigorous connection between the long-time behavior of a collisional many-particle system and the one of its mean-field limit, for bounded as well as unbounded collision rates. Motivated by the inspirative paper by Gr\"unbaum \cite{Grunbaum}, we develop an abstract method that reduces the question of propagation of chaos to that of proving a purely functional estimate on generator operators ({\em consistency estimates}), along with differentiability estimates on the flow of the nonlinear limit equation ({\em stability estimates}). This allows us to exploit dissipativity at the level of the mean-field limit equation rather than the level of the particle system (as proposed by Kac). Using this method we show: (1) Quantitative estimates, that are uniform in time, on the chaoticity of a family of states. (2) Propagation of {\it entropic chaoticity}, as defined in \cite{CCLLV}. (3) Estimates on the time of relaxation to equilibrium, that are \emph{independent of the number of particles in the system}. Our results cover the two main Boltzmann physical collision processes with unbounded collision rates: hard spheres and \emph{true} Maxwell molecules interactions. The proof of the \emph{stability estimates} for these models requires significant analytic efforts and new estimates.