Global Existence and Time Decay for the Vlasov-Hartree System

Abstract

The Vlasov-Hartree system is a mean-field model for a mixture of infinitely many interacting bosons and fermions where the bosons are described quantum mechanically and the fermions are described classically. This paper studies the well-posedness and dispersive properties of the Vlasov-Hartree system with initial data of arbitrary size. We prove that the Vlasov-Hartree system is globally well-posed in a low-regularity functional framework where the particle trajectories are meaningfully defined, but which includes discontinuous fermion densities. The solutions are classical when the initial fermion density is regular enough. Moreover, when the interaction between the bosons and fermions is repulsive, we prove that the system exhibits dispersion in the form of time decay estimates for the particle densities and fields. When the interaction is attractive, we show that, at worst, the fields exhibit very mild growth in time.