Abstract (EN)

This paper studies convergence to equilibrium for the spatially inhomogeneous linear relaxation Boltzmann equation in Boltzmann entropy and related entropy functionals, the p-entropies. Villani proved in [28] entropic hypocoercivity for a class of PDEs in a Hörmander sum of squares form. It was an open question to prove such a result for an operator which does not share this form. We prove a closed entropy-entropy production inequalityà la Villani which implies exponentially fast convergence to equilibrium for the linear Boltzmann equation with a quantitative rate. The key new idea appearing in our proof is the use of a total derivative of the entropy of a projection of our solution to compensate for an error term which appears when using non-linear entropies. We also extend the proofs for hypocoercivity for the linear relaxation Boltzmann to the case of Φ-entropy functionals.