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This article presents a common setting for the collision integrals $\mathrm{St}$ appearing in the kinetic theory of dense gases. It includes the collision integrals of the Enskog equation, of (a variant of) the Povzner equation, and of a model for soft sphere collisions proposed by Cercignani [Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 36 (1983), 479-494]. All these collision integrals are delocalized, in the sense that they involve products of the distribution functions of gas molecules evaluated at positions whose distance is of the order of the molecular radius. Our first main result is to express these collision integrals as the divergence in $v$ of some mass current, where $v$ is the velocity variable, while $v_i\mathrm{St}$ and $|v|^2\mathrm{St}$ are expressed as the phase space divergence (i.e divergence in both position and velocity) of appropriate momentum and energy currents. This extends to the case of dense gases an earlier result by Villani [Math. Modelling Numer. Anal. M2AN 33 (1999), 209-227] in the case of the classical Boltzmann equation (where the collision integral is involves products of the distribution function of gas molecules evaluated at different velocities, but at the same position. Applications of this conservative formulation of delocalized collision integrals include the possibility of obtaining the local conservation laws of momentum and energy starting from this kinetic theory of denses gases. Similarly a local variant of the Boltzmann H Theorem, involving some kind of free energy instead of Boltzmann's H function, can be obtained in the form of an expression for the entropy production in terms of the phase space divergence of some phase space current, and of a nonpositive term., Comment: 32 pages, 1 figure

We present a simple model in dimension $d\geq 2$ for slowing particles in random media, where point particles move in straight lines among and inside spherical identical obstacles with Poisson distributed centres. When crossing an obstacle, a particle is slowed down according to the law $\dot{V}= -\frac{\kappa}{\epsilon} S(|V|) V$, where $V$ is the velocity of the point particle, $\kappa$ is a positive constant, $\epsilon$ is the radius of the obstacle and $S(|V|)$ is a given slowing profile. With this choice, the slowing rate in the obstacles is such that the variation of speed at each crossing is of order $1$. We study the asymptotic limit of the particle system when $\epsilon$ vanishes and the mean free path of the point particles stays finite. We prove the convergence of the point particles density measure to the solution of a kinetic-like equation with a collision term which includes a contribution proportional to a $\delta$ function in $v=0$; this contribution guarantees the conservation of mass for the limit equation., Comment: 30 pages, 0 figures; added acknowledgement to Pessoa project, no changes in the scientific part

A half-space problem of a linear kinetic equation for gas molecules physisorbed close to a solid surface, relevant to a kinetic model of gas-surface interactions and derived by Aoki et al. [K.~Aoki et al., in: Phys. Rev. E 106:035306, 2022], is considered. The equation contains a confinement potential in the vicinity of the solid surface and an interaction term between gas molecules and phonons. It is proved that a unique solution exists when the incoming molecular flux is specified at infinity. This validates the natural observation that the half-space problem serves as the boundary condition for the Boltzmann equation. It is also proved that the sequence of approximate solutions used for the existence proof converges exponentially fast. In addition, numerical results showing the details of the solution to the half-space problem are presented., Comment: 47 pages, 11 figures

Obtaining a rigorous justification of the kinetic theory of gases from Newton's second law of dynamics for a large number of identical spheres interacting by elastic binary collisions, is a problem formulated by Hilbert in 1900 (Hilbert's 6th problem). In 1975, Lanford demonstrated the validity of the Boltzmann equation over a very short time interval, of the order of a fraction of the average time between two successive collisions experienced by the same particle. This result of Lanford can be interpreted as a kind of law of large numbers as the number of particles tends to infinity. This point of view raises several questions. First, the core of the argument used by Boltzmann to arrive at the equation bearing his name is the assumption that two particles about to collide are statistically almost independent. This suggests to examine the validity of this hypothesis by studying the dynamics of correlations between particles. On the other hand, the interpretation of the Boltzmann equation as a law of large numbers leads to study precisely the fluctuations of the phase space empirical measure of the particle system about its mean (whose evolution is described by the Boltzmann equation). A series of recent papers by T. Bodineau, I. Gallagher, L. Saint-Raymond and S. Simonella answers these various questions and allows going beyond the Boltzmann equation in the understanding of the kinetic theory of gases., Comment: 53 pages, in French language, 3 figures. Bourbaki seminar, November 19th 2022

This text is a set of lecture notes for a 4.5-hour course given at the Erd\"os Center (R\'enyi Institute, Budapest) during the Summer School "Optimal Transport on Quantum Structures" (September 19th-23rd, 2023). Lecture I introduces the quantum analogue of the Wasserstein distance of exponent $2$ defined in [F. Golse, C. Mouhot, T. Paul: Comm. Math. Phys. 343 (2016), 165-205], and in [F. Golse, T. Paul: Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal. 223 (2017) 57-94]. Lecture II discusses various applications of this quantum analogue of the Wasserstein distance of exponent $2$, while Lecture III discusses several of its most important properties, such as the triangle inequality, and the Kantorovich duality in the quantum setting, together with some of their implications., Comment: 81 pages, 7 figures

Most problems in uncertainty quantification, despite its ubiquitousness in scientific computing, applied mathematics and data science, remain formidable on a classical computer. For uncertainties that arise in partial differential equations (PDEs), large numbers M>>1 of samples are required to obtain accurate ensemble averages. This usually involves solving the PDE M times. In addition, to characterise the stochasticity in a PDE, the dimension L of the random input variables is high in most cases, and classical algorithms suffer from curse-of-dimensionality. We propose new quantum algorithms for PDEs with uncertain coefficients that are more efficient in M and L in various important regimes, compared to their classical counterparts. We introduce transformations that transfer the original d-dimensional equation (with uncertain coefficients) into d+L (for dissipative equations) or d+2L (for wave type equations) dimensional equations (with certain coefficients) in which the uncertainties appear only in the initial data. These transformations also allow one to superimpose the M different initial data, so the computational cost for the quantum algorithm to obtain the ensemble average from M different samples is then independent of M, while also showing potential advantage in d, L and precision in computing ensemble averaged solutions or physical observables.

This paper discusses the mean-field limit for the quantum dynamics of $N$ identical bosons in $\mathbf R^3$ interacting via a binary potential with Coulomb type singularity. Our approach is based on the theory of quantum Klimontovich solutions defined in [F. Golse, T. Paul, Commun. Math. Phys. 369 (2019), 1021-1053]. Our first main result is a definition of the interaction nonlinearity in the equation governing the dynamics of quantum Klimontovich solutions for a class of interaction potentials slightly less general than those considered in [T. Kato, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 70 (1951), 195-211]. Our second main result is a new operator inequality satisfied by the quantum Klimontovich solution in the case of an interaction potential with Coulomb type singularity. When evaluated on an initial bosonic pure state, this operator inequality reduces to a Gronwall inequality for a functional introduced in [P. Pickl, Lett. Math. Phys. 97 (2011), 151-164], resulting in a convergence rate estimate for the quantum mean-field limit leading to the time-dependent Hartree equation., Comment: 32 pages, no figure. In this version, the introduction has been slightly modified so as to better indicate the main results in the paper. Similarly, the beginning of section 8.2 has been slightly expanded so as to better explain the connection between quantum Klimontovich solutions and Pickl's functional (specifically, the equivalence between formulas (58) and (18))

These lectures notes are aimed at introducing the reader to some recent mathematical tools and results for the mean-field limit in statistical dynamics. As a warm-up, lecture 1 reviews the approach to the mean-field limit in classical mechanics following the ideas of W. Braun, K. Hepp and R.L. Dobrushin, based on the notions of phase space empirical measures, Klimontovich solutions and Monge-Kantorovich-Wasserstein distances between probability measures. Lecture 2 discusses an analogue of the notion of Klimontovich solution in quantum dynamics, and explains how this notion appears in Pickl's method to handle the case of interaction potentials with a Coulomb type singularity at the origin. Finally, lecture 3 explains how the mean-field and the classical limits can be taken jointly on quantum $N$-particle dynamics, leading to the Vlasov equation. These lectures are based on a series of joint works with C. Mouhot and T. Paul., Comment: 46 pages. Lecture notes of a course given at the CIRM (Centre International de Recherche Math\'ematique), Luminy (France), during the Research School "Scaling Limits from Microscopic to Macroscopic Physics", January 18th-22nd 2021, organized by the Jean-Morlet Chair, with Shi Jin (chair) and Mihai Bostan (local project leader)

Using theoretical and numerical arguments we discuss some of the commonly accepted approximations for the radiative transfer equations in climatology., Comment: 22 pages, 5 figures, one computer listing

We present a time dependent quantum perturbation result, uniform in the Planck constant, for perturbations of potentials whose gradients are Lipschitz continuous by potentials whose gradients are only bounded a.e.. Though this low regularity of the full potential is not enough to provide the existence of the classical underlying dynamics, at variance with the quantum one, our result shows that the classical limit of the perturbed quantum dynamics remains in a tubular neighbourhood of the classical unperturbed one of size of order of the square root of the size of the perturbation. We treat both Schr\"odinger and von Neumann-Heisenberg equations., Comment: 18 pages

An analogue of the quadratic Wasserstein (or Monge-Kantorovich) distance between Borel probability measures on $\mathbf{R}^d$ has been defined in [F. Golse, C. Mouhot, T. Paul: Commun. Math. Phys. 343 (2015), 165-205] for density operators on $L^2(\mathbf{R}^d)$, and used to estimate the convergence rate of various asymptotic theories in the context of quantum mechanics. The present work proves a Kantorovich type duality theorem for this quantum variant of the Monge-Kantorovich or Wasserstein distance, and discusses the structure of optimal quantum couplings. Specifically, we prove that optimal quantum couplings involve a gradient type structure similar to the Brenier transport map (which is the gradient of a convex function), or more generally, to the subdifferential of a l.s.c. convex function as in the Knott-Smith optimality criterion (see Theorem 2.12 in [C. Villani: "Topics in Optimal Transportation", Amer. Math. Soc. 2003])., Comment: 48 pages, no figure. This new version includes a more detailed discussion of the case of finite rank densities

This paper discusses a numerical method for computing the evolution of large interacting system of quantum particles. The idea of the random batch method is to replace the total interaction of each particle with the $N-1$ other particles by the interaction with $p1$ and independent of the Planck constant $\hbar$., Comment: 23 pages

This paper proves the validity of the joint mean-field and classical limit of the quantum $N$-body dynamics leading to the pressureless Euler-Poisson system for factorized initial data whose first marginal has a monokinetic Wigner measure. The interaction potential is assumed to be the repulsive Coulomb potential. The validity of this derivation is limited to finite time intervals on which the Euler-Poisson system has a smooth solution that is rapidly decaying at infinity. One key ingredient in the proof is an inequality from [S. Serfaty, with an appendix of M. Duerinckx arXiv:1803.08345v3 [math.AP]]., Comment: 35 pages, no figure

We compare bipartite (Euclidean) matching problems in classical and quantum mechanics. The quantum case is treated in terms of a quantum version of the Wasserstein distance introduced in [F. Golse, C. Mouhot, T. Paul, Commun. Math. Phys. 343 (2016), 165-205]. We show that the optimal quantum cost can be cheaper than the classical one. We treat in detail the case of two particles: the equal mass case leads to equal quantum and classical costs. Moreover, we show examples with different masses for which the quantum cost is strictly cheaper than the classical cost.

In this paper, we define a quantum analogue of the notion of empirical measure in the classical mechanics of $N$-particle systems. We establish an equation governing the evolution of our quantum analogue of the $N$-particle empirical measure, and we prove that this equation contains the Hartree equation as a special case. Our main application of this new object to the mean-field limit of the $N$-particle Schr\"odinger equation is an $O(1/\sqrt{N})$ convergence rate in some dual Sobolev norm for the Wigner transform of the single-particle marginal of the $N$-particle density operator, uniform in $\hbar\in(0,1]$ (where $\hbar$ is the Planck constant) provided that $V$ and $(-\Delta)^{3+d/2}V$ have integrable Fourier transforms., Comment: 35 pages, no figure

In this paper, we extend the upper and lower bounds for the "pseudo-distance" on quantum densities analogous to the quadratic Monge-Kantorovich(-Vasershtein) distance introduced in [F. Golse, C. Mouhot, T. Paul, Commun. Math. Phys. 343 (2016) 165-205] to positive quantizations defined in terms of the family of phase space translates of a density operator, not necessarily of rank one as in the case of the T\"oplitz quantization. As a corollary, we prove that the uniform (for vanishing h) convergence rate for the mean-field limit of the N-particle Heisenberg equation holds for a much wider class of initial data than in [F. Golse, C. Mouhot, T. Paul, loc. cit.]. We also discuss the relevance of the pseudo-distance compared to the Schatten norms for the purpose of metrizing the set of quantum density operators in the semiclassical regime., Comment: 23 pages, no figure

In this paper the Hartree equation is derived from the $N$-body Schr\''odinger equation in the mean-field limit, with convergence rate estimates that are uniform in the Planck constant $\hbar$. Specifically, we consider the two following cases:(a) T\''oplitz initial data and Lipschitz interaction forces, and (b) analytic initial data and interaction potential, over short time intervals independent of $\hbar$. The convergence rates in these two cases are $1/\sqrt{\log\log N}$ and $1/N$ respectively. The treatment of the second case is entirely self-contained and all the constants appearing in the final estimate are explicit. It provides a derivation of the Vlasov equation from the $N$-body classical dynamics using BBGKY hierarchies instead of empirical measures.

This paper aims to justify the Maxwell-Boltzmann approximation for electrons, preserving the dynamics of ions at the kinetic level. Under sufficient regularity assumption, we provide a precise scaling where the Maxwell-Boltzmann approximation is obtained. In addition, we prove that the reduced ions problem is well-posed globally in time.

In this paper, we establish (1) the classical limit of the Hartree equation leading to the Vlasov equation, (2) the classical limit of the $N$-body linear Schr\"{o}dinger equation uniformly in N leading to the N-body Liouville equation of classical mechanics and (3) the simultaneous mean-field and classical limit of the N-body linear Schr\"{o}dinger equation leading to the Vlasov equation. In all these limits, we assume that the gradient of the interaction potential is Lipschitz continuous. All our results are formulated as estimates involving a quantum analogue of the Monge-Kantorovich distance of exponent 2 adapted to the classical limit, reminiscent of, but different from the one defined in [F. Golse, C. Mouhot, T. Paul, Commun. Math. Phys. 343 (2016), 165-205]. As a by-product, we also provide bounds on the quadratic Monge-Kantorovich distances between the classical densities and the Husimi functions of the quantum density matrices., Comment: 33 pages

The main result in this paper is a new inequality bearing on solutions of the $N$-body linear Schr\"{o}dinger equation and of the mean field Hartree equation. This inequality implies that the mean field limit of the quantum mechanics of $N$ identical particles is uniform in the classical limit and provides a quantitative estimate of the quality of the approximation. This result applies to the case of $C^{1,1}$ interaction potentials. The quantity measuring the approximation of the $N$-body quantum dynamics by its mean field limit is analogous to the Monge-Kantorovich (or Wasserstein) distance with exponent $2$. The inequality satisfied by this quantity is reminiscent of the work of Dobrushin on the mean field limit in classical mechanics [Func. Anal. Appl. 13 (1979), 115-123]. Our approach of this problem is based on a direct analysis of the $N$-particle Liouville equation, and avoids using techniques based on the BBGKY hierarchy or on second quantization., Comment: 38 pages. Final version, to appear in Communications in Mathematical Physics

The kinetic theory of Maxwell and Boltzmann has been the subject of major scientific controversies. The alleged incompatibility between the reversible nature of the equations of classical mechanics and the increase of entropy, which, in the kinetic theory of gases, is a mathematical property of the Boltzmann equation known as the H Theorem, was one of the most basic arguments against the validity of kinetic theory. About a century later, in 1974, O. Lanford proposed a strategy to prove that the Boltzmann equation describes a particular asymptotic limit of Newton's equations of classical mechanics for a system made of a large number N of spherical particles interacting by elastic collisions. A recent work by I. Gallagher, L. Saint-Raymond and B. Texier completes Lanford's proof and extends it to the case where the interaction between particles is given by a short range potential. In a later article, T. Bodineau, I. Gallagher and L. Saint-Raymond study the dynamics of a tagged particle among N other identical particles in the same asymptotic regime, and prove the validity of the linear Boltzmann equation on arbitrary large periods of time as N tends to infinity. Using classical results on the asymptotic theory of the linear Boltzmann equation, the same authors prove that the stochastic process known as the "Brownian motion" describes a particular limit of the deterministic dynamics of interacting particles., Comment: 39 pages, in French. Bourbaki Seminar, March 2014

This paper provides an elementary proof of the classical limit of the Schr\"{o}dinger equation with WKB type initial data and over arbitrary long finite time intervals. We use only the stationary phase method and the Laptev-Sigal simple and elegant construction of a parametrix for Schr\"{o}dinger type equations [A. Laptev, I. Sigal, Review of Math. Phys. 12 (2000), 749-766]. We also explain in detail how the phase shifts across caustics obtained when using the Laptev-Sigal parametrix are related to the Maslov index., Comment: 21 pages

The present paper discusses the diffusion approximation of the linear Boltzmann equation in cases where the collision frequency is not uniformly large in the spatial domain. Our results apply for instance to the case of radiative transfer in a composite medium with optically thin inclusions in an optically thick background medium. The equation governing the evolution of the approximate particle density coincides with the limit of the diffusion equation with infinite diffusion coefficient in the optically thin inclusions., Comment: 30 pages

The present note reviews some aspects of the mean field limit for Vlasov type equations with Lipschitz continuous interaction kernel. We discuss in particular the connection between the approach involving the N-particle empirical measure and the formulation based on the BBGKY hierarchy. This leads to a more direct proof of the quantitative estimates on the propagation of chaos obtained on a more general class of interacting systems in [S.Mischler, C. Mouhot, B. Wennberg, arXiv:1101.4727]. Our main result is a stability estimate on the BBGKY hierarchy uniform in the number of particles, which implies a stability estimate in the sense of the Monge-Kantorovich distance with exponent 1 on the infinite mean field hierarchy. This last result amplifies Spohn's uniqueness theorem [H. Spohn, Math. Meth. Appl. Sci. 3 (1981), 445-455]., Comment: 25 pages, one typo corrected, some explanations on the notion of statistical solution of the mean field PDE added in sections 5-6, some comments on the meaning of Theorem 3.1 added at the beginning of section 3, one reference added

This course explains how the usual mean field evolution partial differential equations (PDEs) in Statistical Physics - such as the Vlasov-Poisson system, the vorticity formulation of the two-dimensional Euler equation for incompressible fluids, or the time-dependent Hartree equation in quantum mechanics - can be rigorously derived from first principles, i.e. from the fundamental microscopic equations that govern the evolution of large, interacting particle systems. The emphasis is put on the mathematical methods used in these derivations, such as Dobrushin's stability estimate in the Monge-Kantorovich distance for the empirical measures built on the solution of the N-particle motion equations in classical mechanics, or the theory of BBGKY hierarchies in the case of classical as well as quantum problems. We explain in detail how these different approaches are related; in particular we insist on the notion of chaotic sequences and on the propagation of chaos in the BBGKY hierarchy as the number of particles tends to infinity., Comment: 133 pages; lecture notes for a course at the NDNS+ Applied Dynamical Systems Summer School "Macroscopic and large scale phenomena", Universiteit Twente, Enschede (The Netherlands)

Consider in the phase space of classical mechanics a Radon measure that is a probability density carried by the graph of a Lipschitz continuous (or even less regular) vector field. We study the structure of the push-forward of such a measure by a Hamiltonian flow. In particular, we provide an estimate on the number of folds in the support of the transported measure that is the image of the initial graph by the flow. We also study in detail the type of singularities in the projection of the transported measure in configuration space (averaging out the momentum variable). We study the conditions under which this projected measure can have atoms, and give an example in which the projected measure is singular with respect to the Lebesgue measure and diffuse. We discuss applications of our results to the classical limit of the Schr\"{o}dinger equation. Finally we present various examples and counterexamples showing that our results are sharp., Comment: 35 pages; main theorems gathered in section 2; examples and counterexamples gathered in section 3; examples 3.1 and 3.4 added; example 3.3 extended to the case of smooth momentum profiles; proof of Maslov's Theorem 1.1 (formerly Proposition 7.4) removed; some typos corrected

The present work establishes the mean-field limit of a N-particle system towards a regularized variant of the relativistic Vlasov-Maxwell system, following the work of Braun-Hepp [Comm. in Math. Phys. 56 (1977), 101-113] and Dobrushin [Func. Anal. Appl. 13 (1979), 115-123] for the Vlasov-Poisson system. The main ingredients in the analysis of this system are (a) a kinetic formulation of the Maxwell equations in terms of a distribution of electromagnetic potential in the momentum variable, (b) a regularization procedure for which an analogue of the total energy - i.e. the kinetic energy of the particles plus the energy of the electromagnetic field - is conserved and (c) an analogue of Dobrushin's stability estimate for the Monge-Kantorovich-Rubinstein distance between two solutions of the regularized Vlasov-Poisson dynamics adapted to retarded potentials., Comment: 34 pages

The convergence of solutions of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations set in a domain with boundary to solutions of the Euler equations in the large Reynolds number limit is a challenging open problem both in 2 and 3 space dimensions. In particular it is distinct from the question of existence in the large of a smooth solution of the initial-boundary value problem for the Euler equations. The present paper proposes three results in that direction. First, if the solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations satisfy a slip boundary condition with vanishing slip coefficient in the large Reynolds number limit, we show by an energy method that they converge to the classical solution of the Euler equations on its time interval of existence. Next we show that the incompressible Navier-Stokes limit of the Boltzmann equation with Maxwell's accommodation condition at the boundary is governed by the Navier-Stokes equations with slip boundary condition, and we express the slip coefficient at the fluid level in terms of the accommodation parameter at the kinetic level. This second result is formal, in the style of [Bardos-Golse-Levermore, J. Stat. Phys. 63 (1991), 323-344]. Finally, we establish the incompressible Euler limit of the Boltzmann equation set in a domain with boundary with Maxwell's accommodation condition assuming that the accommodation parameter is small enough in terms of the Knudsen number. Our proof uses the relative entropy method following closely the analysis in [L. Saint-Raymond, Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal. 166 (2003), 47-80] in the case of the 3-torus, except for the boundary terms, which require special treatment., Comment: 40 pages

The fluid dynamic limit of the Boltzmann equation leading to the Euler equations for an incompressible fluid with constant density in the presence of material boundaries shares some important features with the better known inviscid limit of the Navier-Stokes equations. The present paper slightly extends recent results from [C. Bardos, F. Golse, L. Paillard, Comm. Math. Sci., 10 (2012), 159--190] to the case of boundary conditions for the Boltzmann equation more general than Maxwell's accomodation condition., Comment: 22 pages, work presented at the Eighth International Conference for Mesoscopic Methods in Engineering and Science (ICMMES-2011), Lyon, July 4-8 2011

We investigate the speed of approach to Maxwellian equilibrium for a collisionless gas enclosed in a vessel whose wall are kept at a uniform, constant temperature, assuming diffuse reflection of gas molecules on the vessel wall. We establish lower bounds for potential decay rates assuming uniform $L^p$ bounds on the initial distribution function. We also obtain a decay estimate in the spherically symmetric case. We discuss with particular care the influence of low-speed particles on thermalization by the wall., Comment: 22 pages, 1 figure; submitted to Kinetic and Related Models

The two-dimensional, periodic Lorentz gas, is the dynamical system corresponding with the free motion of a point particle in a planar system of fixed circular obstacles centered at the vertices of a square lattice in the Euclidian plane. Assuming elastic collisions between the particle and the obstacles, this dynamical system is studied in the Boltzmann-Grad limit, assuming that the obstacle radius $r$ and the reciprocal mean free path are asymptotically equivalent small quantities, and that the particle's distribution function is slowly varying in the space variable. In this limit, the periodic Lorentz gas cannot be described by a linear Boltzmann equation (see [F. Golse, Ann. Fac. Sci. Toulouse 17 (2008), 735--749]), but involves an integro-differential equation conjectured in [E. Caglioti, F. Golse, C.R. Acad. Sci. S\'er. I Math. 346 (2008) 477--482] and proved in [J. Marklof, A. Str\"ombergsson, preprint arXiv:0801.0612], set on a phase-space larger than the usual single-particle phase-space. The main purpose of the present paper is to study the dynamical properties of this integro-differential equation: identifying its equilibrium states, proving a H Theorem and discussing the speed of approach to equilibrium in the long time limit. In the first part of the paper, we derive the explicit formula for a transition probability appearing in that equation following the method sketched in [E. Caglioti, F. Golse, loc. cit.]., Comment: 43 pages, 3 figures, revised version accepted for publication in the Journal of Statistical Physics

Consider a linear Boltzmann equation posed on the Euclidian plane with a periodic system of circular holes and for particles moving at speed 1. Assuming that the holes are absorbing -- i.e. that particles falling in a hole remain trapped there forever, we discuss the homogenization limit of that equation in the case where the reciprocal number of holes per unit surface and the length of the circumference of each hole are asymptotically equivalent small quantities. We show that the mass loss rate due to particles falling into the holes is governed by a renewal equation that involves the distribution of free-path lengths for the periodic Lorentz gas. In particular, it is proved that the total mass of the particle system at time t decays exponentially fast as t tends to infinity. This is at variance with the collisionless case discussed in [Caglioti, E., Golse, F., Commun. Math. Phys. 236 (2003), pp. 199--221], where the total mass decays as Const./t as the time variable t tends to infinity., Comment: 29 pages, 1 figure, submitted; figure 1 corrected in new version

The Drude-Lorentz model for the motion of electrons in a solid is a classical model in statistical mechanics, where electrons are represented as point particles bouncing on a fixed system of obstacles (the atoms in the solid). Under some appropriate scaling assumption -- known as the Boltzmann-Grad scaling by analogy with the kinetic theory of rarefied gases -- this system can be described in some limit by a linear Boltzmann equation, assuming that the configuration of obstacles is random [G. Gallavotti, [Phys. Rev. (2) vol. 185 (1969), 308]). The case of a periodic configuration of obstacles (like atoms in a crystal) leads to a completely different limiting dynamics. These lecture notes review several results on this problem obtained in the past decade as joint work with J. Bourgain, E. Caglioti and B. Wennberg., Comment: 62 pages. Course at the conference "Topics in PDEs and applications 2008" held in Granada, April 7-11 2008; figure 13 and a misprint in Theorem 4.6 corrected in the new version

We study the Schr\"odinger equation which comes from the paraxial approximation of the Helmholtz equation in the case where the direction of propagation is tilted with respect to the boundary of the domain. In a first part, a mathematical analysis is made which leads to an analytical formula of the solution in the simple case where the refraction index and the absorption coefficients are constant. Afterwards, we propose a numerical method for solving the initial problem which uses the previous analytical expression. Numerical results are presented. We also sketch an extension to a time dependant model which is relevant for laser plasma interaction.

The present paper proves that all limit points of sequences of renormalized solutions of the Boltzmann equation in the limit of small, asymptotically equivalent Mach and Knudsen numbers are governed by Leray solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations. This convergence result holds for hard cutoff potentials in the sense of H. Grad, and therefore completes earlier results by the same authors [Invent. Math. 155, 81-161(2004)] for Maxwell molecules., Comment: 56 pages, LaTeX, a few typos have been corrected, a few remarks added, one uncited reference removed

The periodic Lorentz gas is the dynamical system corresponding to the free motion of a point particle in a periodic system of fixed spherical obstacles of radius $r$ centered at the integer points, assuming all collisions of the particle with the obstacles to be elastic. In this Note, we study this motion on time intervals of order $1/r$ and in the limit as $r\to 0^+$, in the case of two space dimensions.

This article examines the time-dependent Hartree-Fock (TDHF) approximation of single-particle dynamics in systems of interacting fermions. We find the TDHF approximation to be accurate when there are sufficiently many particles and the initial many-particle state is a Slater determinant, or any Gibbs equilibrium state for noninteracting fermions. Assuming a bounded two-particle interaction, we obtain a bound on the error of the TDHF approximation, valid for short times. We further show that the error of the the TDHF approximation vanishes at all times in the mean field limit., Comment: 20 pages

In a flat 2-torus with a disk of diameter $r$ removed, let $\Phi_r(t)$ be the distribution of free-path lengths (the probability that a segment of length larger than $t$ with uniformly distributed origin and direction does not meet the disk). We prove that $\Phi_r(t/r)$ behaves like $\frac{2}{\pi^2 t}$ for each $t>2$ and in the limit as $r\to 0^+$, in some appropriate sense. We then discuss the implications of this result in the context of kinetic theory., Comment: 26 pages, 5 figures, to be published in Commun. Math. Phys

The time-dependent Hartree-Fock equations are derived from the N-particle Schr\"odinger equation with mean-field scaling in the infinite particle limit, for initial data that are like Slater determinants. Only the case of bounded interaction potentials is treated in this work. We prove that, in the infnite particle limit, the first partial trace of the N-particle density operator approaches the solution of the time-dependent Hartree-Fock equations in the trace norm., Comment: 23 pages. This is the final version, to appear in Journal de Mathematiques Pures et Appliquees