Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We consider a model of randomly colliding particles interacting with a thermal bath. Collisions between particles are modeled via the Kac master equation while the thermostat is seen as an infinite gas at thermal equilibrium at inverse temperature \beta. The system admits the canonical distribution at inverse temperature \beta as the unique equilibrium state. We prove that the any initial distribution approaches the equilibrium distribution exponentially fast both by computing the gap of the generator of the evolution, in a proper function space, as well as by proving exponential decay in relative entropy. We also show that the evolution propagates chaos and that the one-particle marginal, in the large system limit, satisfies an effective Boltzmann-type equation. This is joint work with Federico Bonetto and Michael Loss.