Scalable and Quasi-Contractive Markov Coupling of Maxwell Collision

This paper considers space homogenous Boltzmann kinetic equations in dimension $d$ with Maxwell collisions (and without Grad's cut-off). An explicit Markov coupling of the associated conservative (Nanbu) stochastic $N$-particle system is constructed, using plain parallel coupling of isotropic random walks on the sphere of two-body collisional directions. The resulting coupling is almost surely decreasing, and the $L_2$-coupling creation is computed explicitly. Some quasi-contractive and uniform in $N$ coupling / coupling creation inequalities are then proved, relying on $2+\alpha$-moments ($\alpha >0$) of velocity distributions; upon $N$-uniform propagation of moments of the particle system, it yields a $N$-scalable $\alpha$-power law trend to equilibrium. The latter are based on an original sharp inequality, which bounds from above the coupling distance of two centered and normalized random variables $(U,V)$ in $\R^d$, with the average square parallelogram area spanned by $(U-U_\ast,V-V_\ast)$, $(U_\ast,V_\ast)$ denoting an independent copy. Two counter-examples proving the necessity of the dependance on $>2$-moments and the impossibility of strict contractivity are provided. The paper, (mostly) self-contained, does not require any propagation of chaos property and uses only elementary tools.Comment: 29 page

Quasineutral limit for Vlasov-Poisson with Penrose stable data

We study the quasineutral limit of a Vlasov-Poisson system that describes the dynamics of ions in a plasma. We handle data with Sobolev regularity under the sharp assumption that the profile of the initial data in the velocity variable satisfies a Penrose stability condition. As a by-product of our analysis, we obtain a well-posedness theory for the limit equation (which is a Vlasov equation with Dirac distribution as interaction kernel) for such data