Hypocoercivity in Phi-entropy for the Linear Relaxation Boltzmann Equation on the Torus

Abstract

This paper studies convergence to equilibrium for the spatially inhomogeneous linear relaxation Boltzmann equation in Boltzmann entropy and related entropy functionals the $p$-entropies. Villani proved in \cite{V09} entropic hypocoercivity for a class of PDEs in a H\"{o}rmander sum of squares form. It was an open question to prove such a result for an operator which does not share this form. We show exponentially fast convergence to equilibrium with explicit rate in entropy for a linear relaxation Boltzmann equation. The key new idea appearing in our proof is the use of a total derivative of the entropy of a projection of our solution to compensate for additional error term which appear when using non-linear entropies. We also extend the proofs for hypocoercivity of both the linear relaxation Boltzmann and kinetic Fokker-Planck to the case of $p$-entropy functionals.