On the spatially homogeneous landau equation for hard potentials part ii : h-theorem and applications

We find a lower bound for the entropy dissipation of the spatially homogeneous Landau equation with hard potentials in terms of the entropy itself. We deduce from this explicit estimates on the speed of convergence towards equilibrium for the solution of this equation. In the case of so-called overmaxwellian potentials, the convergence is exponential. We also compute a lower bound for the spectral gap of the associated linear operator in this setting.