Global weak solutions to nonlinear kinetic Fokker--Planck equations in bounded domains under physical initial data

Abstract

We establish the global existence of weak solutions to a nonlinear kinetic Fokker--Planck equation with degenerate diffusion, under either inflow or partial absorption-reflection boundary conditions. The novelty of our approach lies in constructing solutions under solely the physical assumptions on the initial and boundary data, namely finite mass, kinetic energy, and entropy, with no additional regularity imposed. To overcome the lack of uniform ellipticity, we develop a new compactness principle based on weighted Fisher information, which yields strong $L^1$ convergence of approximate solutions. This framework provides a robust existence theory under only the physically relevant conditions, and applies uniformly to both inflow and reflection boundary settings.