A gradient flow approach to the Boltzmann equation
Date
Tuesday, April 11, 2017 16:00 - 18:00
Speaker
Matthias Erbar (University of Bonn)
Location
Seminar room Big Ground floor / Office Bldg West (I21.EG.101)
Series
Seminar/Talk
Tags
Mathematics and CS Seminar
Host
Jan Maas
Contact
In this talk I will present a new point of view on the spatially homogeneous Boltzmann equation viewing it as the gradient flow of the entropy. This gradient flow structure relies on a new notion of distance between probability measures that takes the collision process between particles into account and takes over the role of the Wasserstein distance. As two applications of this point of view I will present a time-discrete variational approximation scheme for the homogeneous Boltzmann equation and a new and simple proof for the convergence of Kac's random walk to the Boltzmann equation.