Exact Large Time Behavior of Spherically-Symmetric Plasmas

Abstract

We consider the classical and relativistic Vlasov-Poisson systems with spherically-symmetric initial data and prove the optimal decay rates for all suitable $L^p$ norms of the charge density and electric field, as well as, the optimal growth rates for the largest particle position and momentum on the support of the distribution function. Though a previous work \cite{Horst} established upper bounds on the decay of the supremum of the charge density and electric field, we provide a slightly different proof, attain optimal rates, and extend this result to include all other norms. Additionally, we prove sharp lower bounds on each of the aforementioned quantities and establish the time-asymptotic behavior of all spatial and momentum characteristics. Finally, we investigate the limiting behavior of the spatial average of the particle distribution as $t \to \infty$. In particular, we show that it converges uniformly to a smooth, compactly-supported function that preserves the mass, angular momentum, and energy of the system and depends only upon limiting particle momenta.