COMPACTNESS RESULTS FOR TRANSPORT EQUATIONS AND APPLICATIONS

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to give a systematic analysis of compactness properties for transport equations with general boundary conditions where an abstract boundary operator relates the incoming and outgoing fluxes. The analysis involves two parameters: The velocity measure and the collision operator. Hence, for a large class of (velocity) measures and under appropriate assumptions on scattering operators compactness results are obtained. Using the positivity (in the lattice sense) and the comparison arguments by Dodds–Fremlin, their converses are derived, and necessary conditions for some remainder term of the Dyson–Phillips expansion to be compact are given. Our results are independent of the properties of the boundary operators and play a crucial role in the understanding of the time asymptotic structure of evolution transport problems. Also, although solutions of transport equations propagate singularities (due to the hyperbolic nature of the operator), they bring the regularity in the variable space (regardless of the boundary operator). We end the paper by applying the obtained results to discuss the existence of solutions to a nonlinear boundary value problem and to describe in detail the various essential spectra of transport operators with abstract boundary conditions.