Trajectorial hypocoercivity and application to control theory

Abstract

We present the quantitative method of the recent work arXiv:2209.09340 in a simple setting, together with a compactness argument that was not included in arXiv:2209.09340 and has interest per se. We are concerned with the exponential stabilization (spectral gap) for linear kinetic equations with degenerate thermalization, i.e. when the collision operator vanishes on parts of the spatial domain. The method in arXiv:2209.09340 covers both scattering and Fokker-Planck type operators, and deals with external potential and boundary conditions, but in these notes we present only its core argument and restrict ourselves to the kinetic Fokker-Planck in the periodic torus with unit velocities and a thermalization degeneracy. This equation is not covered by the previous results of Bernard and Salvarani (2013), Han-Kwan and L\'eautaud (2015), Evans and Moyano (arXiv:1907.12836).