Some spectral properties of the streaming operator with general boundary conditions

This paper deals with the spectral study of the streaming operator with general boundary conditions defined by means of a boundary operator K. We study the positivity and the irreducibility of the generated semigroup proved in M. Boulanouar, L’opérateur d’Advection: existence d’un C ₀-semi-groupe (I), Transp. Theory Stat. Phys. 31, 2002, 153–167], in the case ‖K‖ ⩾ 1. We also give some spectral properties of the streaming operator and we characterize the type of the generated semigroup in terms of the solution of a characteristic equation.