Partial Differential Equations in Kinetic Theories

Kinetic equations occur naturally in the modelling of the collective motion of large individual particle ensembles such as molecules in rarefied gases, beads in granular materials, charged particles in semiconductors and plasmas, dust in the atmosphere, cells in biology, or the behaviour of individuals in economical trading … Generally, huge interacting particle systems cannot efficiently be described by the individual dynamics of all particles due to overwhelming complexity but clearly some input from the microscopic behaviour is needed in order to bridge from microscopic dynamics to the macroscopic world, typically rendered in terms of averaged quantities. This leads to classical equations of mathematical physics: the Boltzmann equation of rarified gas dynamics, the fermionic and bosonic Boltzmann equations and the relativistic Vlasov-Maxwell system of particle physics, the quantistic Wigner-Poisson system, to name just a few.