Kinetic limit for a chain of harmonic oscillators with a point Langevin thermostat

Abstract

We consider an infinite chain of coupled harmonic oscillators with a Langevin thermostat attached at the origin and energy, momentum and volume conserving noise that models the collisions between atoms. The noise is rarefied in the limit, {that corresponds to the hypothesis} that in the macroscopic unit time only a finite number of collisions takes place (Boltzmann-Grad limit). We prove that, after the hyperbolic space-time rescaling, the Wigner distribution, describing the energy density of phonons in space-frequency domain, converges to a positive energy density function $W(t, y, k)$ that evolves according to a linear kinetic equation, with the interface condition at $y=0$ that corresponds to reflection, transmission and absorption of phonons. The paper extends the results of [3], where a thermostatted harmonic chain (with no inter-particle scattering) has been considered.