Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We study regularity properties of weak solutions of the homogeneous Boltzmann equation. While under the so called Grad cutoff assumption the homogeneous Boltzmann equation is known to propagate smoothness and singularities, it has long been suspected that the non-cutoff Boltzmann operator has similar coercivity properties as a fractional Laplace operator. This has led to the hope that the homogenous Boltzmann equation enjoys similar smoothing properties as the heat equation with a fractional Laplacian. We prove that any weak solution of the fully nonlinear non-cutoff homogenous Boltzmann equation (for Maxwellian molecules) with initial datum $f_0$ with finite mass, energy and entropy, that is, $f_0 \in L^1_2(\R^d) \cap L \log L(\R^d)$, immediately becomes Gevrey regular for strictly positive times, i.e. it gains infinitely many derivatives and even (partial) analyticity.This is achieved by an inductive procedure based on very precise estimates of nonlinear, nonlocal commutators of the Boltzmann operator with suitable test functions involving exponentially growing Fourier multipliers.(Joint work with Jean-Marie Barbaroux, Dirk Hundertmark, and Semjon Vugalter)

In this talk we will consider a few different mathematical models of gas-like systems of particles, which interact through binary collisions that conserve momentum and mass. The aim of the talk will be to present how one can employ ideas from dynamical systems theory to derive macroscopic properties of such models.

Two-point symmetrizations are simple rearrangementsthat have been used to prove isoperimetric inequalitieson the sphere. For each unit vector u, there is atwo-point symmetrization that pushes mass towardsu across the normal hyperplane.How can full rotational symmetry be recovered from partialinformation? It is known that the reflections at d hyperplanes in general position generate a dense subgroup of O(d);in particular, a continuous function that is symmetric under thesereflections must be radial. How many two-point symmetrizationsare needed to verify that a function which increases under thesesymmetrizations is radial? I will show that d+1 such symmetrizationssuffice, and will discuss the ergodicity of the randomwalk generated by the corresponding folding maps on the sphere.(Joint work with G. R. Chambers and Anne Dranovski).

In this talk I will begin with our recent results on non-equilibrium steady states (NESS) of a microscopic heat conduction model, which is a stochastic particle system coupled to unequal heat baths. This stochastic model is derived from a mechanical chain model (Eckmann and Young 2006) by randomizing certain quantities while retaining the other features. We proved various results including the existence and uniqueness of NESS and the exponential rate of mixing. Then I will follow with an energy dependent Kac-type model that is obtained from an improved version of randomization of the “local" dynamics. We rigorously proved that this Kac-type model has a mixing rate $\sim t^{-2}$. In the end, I will show that slow (polynomial) mixing rates appear in a large class of statistical mechanics models.