Sharp anisotropic estimates for the Boltzmann collision operator and its entropy production

This article provides sharp constructive upper and lower bound estimates for the Boltzmann collision operator with the full range of physical non-cut-off collision kernels (γ>−n and s∈(0,1)) in the trilinear L²(Rn) energy 〈Q(g,f),f〉. These new estimates prove that, for a very general class of g(v), the global diffusive behavior (on f) in the energy space is that of the geometric fractional derivative semi-norm identified in the linearized context in our earlier works (Gressman and Strain, 2010 15], 2011 16]). We further prove new global entropy production estimates with the same anisotropic semi-norm. This resolves the longstanding, widespread heuristic conjecture about the sharp diffusive nature of the non-cut-off Boltzmann collision operator in the energy space L²(Rn).