On fluctuations in μ-space

A master equation is derived microscopically to describe the fluctuating motion of the particle density in . space. This equation accounts for the drift motion of particles and is valid for any inhomogeneous gas. The Boltzmann equation is obtained from the first moment of this equation by neglecting the second cumulant (the pair correlation function). The successive moments form coarse-grained BBGKY-like hierarchy equations, in which small spatial regions with r_ij < the force range are smeared out. These hierarchy equations are convenient for investigating the nonequilibrium long-range pair correlation function, which arises mainly from sequences of isolated binary collisions and gives rise to the much-discussed long-time tail and the logarithmic term in the density expansion of transport coefficients. It is shown to have a spatial long tail, like the Coulombic potential, in a steady laminar flow. The stochastic nature of the nonlinear Boltzmann-Langevin equation is also investigated; the random source term is found to be expressed as a linear superposition of Poisson random variables and to become Gaussian in special cases.     

Fluctuating hydrodynamic equations of mixed and of chemically reacting gases

The method of the nonlinear Langevin equation is generalized to ordinary mixed and to chemically reacting gases. The stochastic Boltzmann equations of these gases, the fluctuating hydrodynamic equations of mixed gases, and the Langevin equations for the number density of each component of a reaction-diffusion system are obtained.This work was supported financially by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The main part of the paper was written during the author's stay at the Max-Planck Institut für Festkörperforschung (Stuttgart) as a Humboldt fellow.     

Inelastic collisional effect on a dilute granular shock layer with a heated wall

The inelastic collisional effect on a shock layer of a dilute granular gas with a heated wall is numerically studied. To investigate the inelastic collisional effect via the gain term in the inelastic Boltzmann equation on the shock layer, an inelastic Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook (BGK) type equation, whose loss term is equivalent to that in the inelastic Boltzmann equation, is formulated on the basis of the kinetic theory of the granular gas. The inelastic BGK-type equation formulated for a hard-sphere particle is generalized to that for an inverse power law (IPL) molecule. Numerical results in a weakly inelastic regime confirm the nonequilirium contribution to the cooling rate, when the collision frequency depends on the particle velocity. The profile of the negative high-velocity tail of the distribution function in the generation regime of the shock wave obtained by the Direct Simulation Monte Carlo method is higher than that obtained by the proposed BGK-type equation when the collision frequency depends on the particle velocity because of the inelastic collisional effect via the gain term in the inelastic Boltzmann equation, which is not included in the proposed BGK-type equation.     

Kinetic theory of dense fluids

A kinetic theory of dense fluids is presented in this series of papers. The theory is based on a kinetic equation for subsystems which represents a subset of equations structurally invariant to the sizes of the subsystem that includes the Boltzmann equation as an element at the low density limit. There exists a H-function for the kinetic equation and the equilibrium solution is uniquely given by the canonical distribution functions for the subsystems comprising the entire system. The cluster expansion is discussed for the N-body collision operator appearing in the kinetic equation. The kinetic parts of transport coefficients are obtained by means of a moment method and their density expansions are formally obtained. The Chapman-Enskog method is discussed in the subsequent paper.     

Fluctuating hydrodynamics for driven granular gases

We study a granular gas heated by a stochastic thermostat in the dilute limit. Starting from the kinetic equations governing the evolution of the correlation functions, a Boltzmann-Langevin equation is constructed. The spectrum of the corresponding linearized Boltzmann-Fokker-Planck operator is analyzed, and the equation for the fluctuating transverse velocity is derived in the hydrodynamic limit. The noise term (Langevin force) is thus known microscopically and contains two terms: one coming from the thermostat and the other from the fluctuating pressure tensor. At variance with the free cooling situation, the noise is found to be white and its amplitude is evaluated.     

Transport equations for chiral fermions to order ? and electroweak baryogenesis: Part I

This is the first in a series of two papers. In this first part, we use the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism to derive semiclassical Boltzmann transport equations, accurate to order ?, for massive chiral fermions, scalar particles, and for the corresponding CP-conjugate states. Our considerations include complex mass terms and mixing fermion and scalar fields, such that CP-violation is naturally included, rendering the equations particularly suitable for studies of baryogenesis at a first order electroweak phase transition. We provide a quantitative criterion in which case the reduction to the diagonal kinetic equations in the mass eigenbasis is justified, leading to a quasiparticle picture even in the case of mixing scalar or fermionic particles. Within the approximations we make, it is possible to first study the Boltzmann equations without the collision term. In a second paper [Ann. Phys. xxx (2004) xxx] we discuss the collision terms and reduce the Boltzmann equations to fluid equations.     

Strict entropy production bounds and stability of the rate of convergence to equilibrium for the Boltzmann equation

We first consider the Boltzmann equation with a collision kernel such that all kinematically possible collisions are run at equal rates. This is the simplest Boltzmann equation having the compressible Euler equations as a scaling limit. For it we prove a stability result for theH-theorem which says that when the entropy production is small, the solution of the spatially homogeneous Boltzmann equation is necessarily close to equilibrium in the entropie sense, and therefore strongL ¹ sense. We use this to prove that solutions to the spatially homogeneous Boltzmann equation converge to equilibrium in the entropie sense with a rate of convergence which is uniform in the initial condition for all initial conditions belonging to certain natural regularity classes. Every initial condition with finite entropy andp ^th velocity moment for some p>2 belongs to such a class. We then extend these results by a simple monotonicity argument to the case where the collision rate is uniformly bounded below, which covers a wide class of slightly modified physical collision kernels. These results are the basis of a study of the relation between scaling limits of solutions of the Boltzmann equation and hydrodynamics which will be developed in subsequent papers; the program is described here.On leave from School of Mathematics, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332.On leave from C.F.M.C. and Departamento de Matemática da Faculdade de Ciencias de Lisboa, 1700 Lisboa codex, Portugal.     

Kinetische Herleitung verallgemeinerter NERNST-PLANCK-Gleichungen. II.

The equations of motion derived in part I contain three terms, which don't allow the immediate application of these equations: The pressure tensors, the collective force in the equation of the pair distributions, and the term containing the short range interaction. The latter can be transformed, with the help of an assumption concerning the macroscopic state of the system, into the first moments of Boltzmann collision operators. These operators and the pressure tensors are evaluated in the hydrodynamic approximation. From the assumption concerning the macroscopic state it follows that the three particle densities are functionals of the pair distributions. Thus one has a closed system of equations for the densities, the pairdensities, the mean velocities and the correlation velocities.     

Interrelations between soluble model Boltzmann equations

It is shown that the Boltzmann equation for the energy distribution function of several soluble models may be interpreted as having a deterministic (with momentum conservation) or a stochastic (without momentum conservation) scattering law, and that whole families of models with different dimensionality can be solved from the same set of moment equations.     

Two-body collisions and mean-field theory: The Brueckner-Boltzmann equation

Starting from the BBGKY hierarchy of density matrices, a quantum mechanical Boltzmann equation, including a mean field, is derived. Both the mean field, which is of the well-known Brueckner-Hartree-Fock form, as well as the collision term are expressed in terms of the self-consistent Brueckner G-matrix. The relation with the generalized Boltzmann equation of Kadanoff and Baym is discussed. It is shown that the usual quantum mechanical theories like TDHF and Uehling-Uhlenbeck appear as limiting cases.     

The stochastic Boltzmann equation and hydrodynamic fluctuations

Based on the assumption of a kinetic equation in space, a stochastic differential equation of the one-particle distribution is derived without the use of the linear approximation. It is just the Boltzmann equation with a Langevin-fluctuating force term. The result is the general form of the linearized Boltzmann equation with fluctuations found by Bixon and Zwanzig and by Fox and Uhlenbeck. It reduces to the general Landau-Lifshitz equations of fluid dynamics in the presence of fluctuations in a similar hydrodynamic approximation to that used by Chapman and Enskog with respect to the Boltzmann equation.This work received financial support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.     

Some comments on modeling the linearized Boltzmann equation

Some exact solutions of the homogeneous and the inhomogeneous linearized Boltzmann equation (LBE) for rigid-sphere collisions are used to define two model equations in the general area of rarefied-gas dynamics. These equations are obtained from a systematic development of two synthetic scattering kernels that yield model equations that have as exact solutions certain known exact solutions of the homogeneous and of the inhomogeneous LBE. The first model established is defined in terms of the collisional invariants and the Chapman-Enskog integral equations for viscosity and for heat conduction. An extended model is defined also in terms of the collisional invariants and the Chapman-Enskog functions for viscosity and heat conduction, but the first and second Burnett functions are also included in the model. The variable collision frequency or generalized BGK model is also obtained as a special case. In addition, the exact mean-free paths defined, for rigid-sphere collisions and the LBE, in terms of viscosity or heat conduction are employed to define approximations of these quantities that are consistent with the use of the variable collision frequency model.     

On the Global Existence of Mild Solutions to the Boltzmann Equation for Small Data in <Emphasis Type="Italic">L</Emphasis><Superscript><Emphasis Type="Italic">D</Emphasis></Superscript>

We develop a new theory of existence of global solutions to the Boltzmann equation for small initial data. These new mild solutions are analogous to the mild solutions for the Navier-Stokes equations. The existence comes as a result of the study of the competing phenomena of dispersion, due to the transport operator, and of singularity formation, due to the nonlinear Boltzmann collision operator. It is the joint use of the so-called dispersive estimates with new convolution inequalities on the gain term of the collision operator that allows to obtain uniform bounds on the solutions and thus demonstrate the existence of solutions.     

Dissipative relativistic fluid dynamics: a new way to derive the equations of motion from kinetic theory

We rederive the equations of motion of dissipative relativistic fluid dynamics from kinetic theory. In contrast with the derivation of Israel and Stewart, which considered the second moment of the Boltzmann equation to obtain equations of motion for the dissipative currents, we directly use the latter's definition. Although the equations of motion obtained via the two approaches are formally identical, the coefficients are different. We show that, for the one-dimensional scaling expansion, our method is in better agreement with the solution obtained from the Boltzmann equation.     

The Boltzmann equation for a polyatomic gas

A formulation of the kinetic theory of dilute, classical polyatomic gases is given which parallels the Waldmann development for structureless molecules. In the first section the Boltzmann equation is written in terms of the specific rates of inelastic collision processes and then the properties of these rates and those of the corresponding collision cross sections are examined. The dependence of the distribution function on the dynamical variables is discussed and the equations of change for the gas are derived. Finally, a study is made of the properties of the linearized Boltzmann collision operation. In the second section the Boltzmann equation is deduced from a rigorous statistical-mechanical point of view and discussed in terms of the basic ideas of Bogoliubov. The computationally important special case of impulsive interactions is then considered.This research was supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation and in part by the Ames Laboratory of the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission. Contribution No. 2554.     

含振动能激发Boltzmann模型方程气体动理论统一算法验证与分析

为模拟研究高温高马赫数下多原子气体内能激发对跨流域非平衡流动的影响,将转动能、振动能分别作为气体分子速度分布函数的自变量,把转动能和振动能处理为连续分布的能量模式,将Boltzmann方程的碰撞项分解成弹性碰撞项和非弹性碰撞项,同时将非弹性碰撞按一定松弛速率分解为平动-转动能松弛过程和平动-转动-振动能松弛过程,构造了一类考虑振动能激发的Boltzmann模型方程,并证明了其守恒性和H定理.基于内部能量变量对分布函数无穷积分,引入三个约化速度分布函数,得到一组考虑振动能激发的约化速度分布函数控制方程组,使用离散速度坐标法,基于LU-SGS隐式格式和有限体积法求解离散速度分布函数,建立含振动能激发的气体动理论统一算法.通过开展高稀薄流到连续流圆柱绕流问题统一算法与直接模拟蒙特卡罗法模拟结果对比分析,特别是过渡流区平动、转动、振动非平衡效应对绕流流场与物面力热特性的影响机制,证实了所建立的含振动能激发的Boltzmann模型方程及气体动理论统一算法的准确可靠性.     

Conversion between kinetic energy and potential energy in the classical nonlocal Boltzmann equation

An important property of the classical Boltzmann equation is that kinetic energy is conserved. This is closely connected to the fact that the Boltzmann equation describes the nonequilibrium properties of an ideal gas. Generalizations of the Boltzmann equation to higher density involve, among other things, allowing the colliding particles to be at different positions. This spatial nonlocality is known to contribute to the density corrections of gas transport properties. For soft potentials such a spatial separation of the particles also leads to a conversion between kinetic and potential energy. In evaluating these effects the classical dynamics of the whole collision trajectory must be taken into account, involving also the time for the collision process. The resulting time nonlocality has usually been reinterpreted in terms of a spatial nonlocality. However, for a homogeneous system this is not possible and only the time nonlocality remains, this then being responsible for the conversion between kinetic and potential energy. This paper aims to clarify these properties of the nonlocal corrections to the classical mechanical Boltzmann collision term. Comments on the corresponding problem for the quantum Boltzmann equation are also made.     

Towards a quantitative kinetic theory of polar active matter

A recent kinetic approach for Vicsek-like models of active particles is reviewed. The theory is based on an exact Chapman- Kolmogorov equation in phase space. It can handle discrete time dynamics and “exotic” multi-particle interactions. A nonlocal mean-field theory for the one-particle distribution function is obtained by assuming molecular chaos. The Boltzmann approach of Bertin, et al., Phys. Rev. E 74, 022101 (2006) and J. Phys. A 42, 445001 (2009), is critically assessed and compared to the current approach. In Boltzmann theory, a collision starts when two particles enter each others action spheres and is finished when their distance exceeds the interaction radius. The average duration of such a collision, τ₀, is measured for the Vicsek model with continuous time-evolution. If the noise is chosen to be close to the flocking threshold, the average time between collisions is found to be roughly equal to τ₀ at low densities. Thus, the continuous-time Vicsek-model near the flocking threshold cannot be accurately described by a Boltzmann equation, even at very small density because collisions take so long that typically other particles join in, rendering Boltzmann’s binary collision assumption invalid. Hydrodynamic equations for the phase space approach are derived by means of a Chapman-Enskog expansion. The equations are compared to the Toner-Tu theory of polar active matter. New terms, absent in the Toner-Tu theory, are highlighted. Convergence problems of Chapman-Enskog and similar gradient expansions are discussed.     

Nonlinear moment method for the isotropic Boltzmann equation and invariance of the collision integral

A new approach is proposed for the development of a nonlinear moment method of solving the Boltzmann equation. This approach is based on the principle of invariance of the collision integral with respect to the choice of basis functions. Sonine polynomials with a Maxwellian weighting function are taken as these basis functions for the velocity-isotropic Boltzmann equation. It is shown that for arbitrary interaction cross sections the matrix elements corresponding to the moments of the nonlinear collision integral are not independent but are coupled by simple recurrence formulas by means of which all the nonlinear matrix elements are expressed in terms of linear ones. As a result, a highly efficient numerical scheme is constructed for calculating the nonlinear matrix elements. The proposed approach opens up prospects for calculating relaxation processes at high velocities and also for solving more complex kinetic problems. Zh. Tekh. Fiz. 69, 22–29 (June 1999)