## The Vlasov-Poisson System with Steady Spatial Asymptotics

Series
PDE Seminar
Time
Tuesday, September 29, 2009 - 3:05pm for 1.5 hours (actually 80 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Stephen Pankavich – University of Texas, Arlington
Organizer
Zhiwu Lin
We formulate a plasma model in which negative ions tend to a fixed, spatially-homogeneous background of positive charge. Instead of solutions with compact spatial support, we must consider those that tend to the background as x tends to infinity. As opposed to the traditional Vlasov-Poisson system, the total charge and energy are thus infinite, and energy conservation (which is an essential component of global existence for the traditional problem) cannot provide bounds for a priori estimates. Instead, a conserved quantity related to the energy is used to bound particle velocities and prove the existence of a unique, global-in-time, classical solution. The proof combines these energy estimates with a crucial argument which establishes spatial decay of the charge density and electric field.