About Kac's Program in Kinetic Theory
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Abstract
In this Note we present the main results from the recent work
arxiv:1107.3251, which answers several conjectures raised fifty years ago by
Kac. There Kac introduced a many-particle stochastic process (now denoted as
Kac's master equation) which, for chaotic data, converges to the spatially
homogeneous Boltzmann equation. We answer the three following questions raised
in \cite{kac}: (1) prove the propagation of chaos for realistic microscopic
interactions (i.e. in our results: hard spheres and true Maxwell molecules);
(2) relate the time scales of relaxation of the stochastic process and of the
limit equation by obtaining rates independent of the number of particles; (3)
prove the convergence of the many-particle entropy towards the Boltzmann
entropy of the solution to the limit equation (microscopic justification of the