Exponential Convergence to Equilibrium for the Homogeneous Boltzmann Equation for Hard Potentials Without Cut-Off

This paper deals with the long time behavior of solutions to the spatially homogeneous Boltzmann equation. The interactions considered are the so-called (non cut-off with a moderate angular singularity and non mollified) hard potentials. We prove an exponential in time convergence towards the equilibrium, improving results of Villani (Commun Math Phys 234(3): 455–490, 2003) where a polynomial decay to equilibrium is proven. The basis of the proof is the study of the linearized equation for which we prove a new spectral gap estimate in a (L^1) space with a polynomial weight by taking advantage of the theory of enlargement of the functional space for the semigroup decay developed by Gualdani et al. (http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ccsd-00495786, 2013). We then get our final result by combining this new spectral gap estimate with bilinear estimates on the collisional operator that we establish.