Large time behavior of the a priori bounds for the solutions to the spatially homogeneous Boltzmann equations with soft potentials.

We consider the spatially homogeneous Boltzmann equation for regularized soft potentials and Grad's angular cutoff. We prove that uniform (in time) bounds in L1((1+|v|s) dv) and Hk norms, s, k≥0 hold for its solution. The proof is based on the mixture of estimates of polynomial growth in time of those norms together with the quantitative results of relaxation to equilibrium in L1 obtained by the so-called “entropy–entropy production” method in the context of dissipative systems with slowly growing a priori bounds (G. Toscani and C. Villani, J. Statist. Phys. 98 (2000), 1279–1309). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]