Some New Results for McKean’s Graphs with Applications to Kac’s Equation

The main goal of the present paper is to sharpen some results about the error made when the Wild sums, used to represent the solution of the Kac analog of Boltzmann’s equation, are truncated at the n-th stage. More precisely, in Carlen, Carvalho and Gabetta (J. Funct. Anal. 220: 362–387 (2005)), one finds a bound for the above-mentioned error which depends on (an ^Λ+ε). On the one hand, it is shown that Λ, the least negative eigenvalue of the linearized collision operator, is the best possible exponent. On the other hand, ε is an extra strictly positive number and a a positive coefficient which depends on ε too. Thus, it is interesting to check whether ε can be removed from the above bound. According to the aforesaid reference, this problem is studied here by means of the probability distribution of the depth of a leaf in a McKean random tree. In fact, an accurate study of the probability generating function of such a depth leads to conclude that the above bound can be replaced with (a′ n ^Λ).