Suppression of plasma echoes and Landau damping in Sobolev spaces by weak collisions in a Vlasov-Fokker-Planck equation

Abstract: In this paper, we study Landau damping in the weakly collisional limit of a Vlasov-Fokker-Planck equation with nonlinear collisions in the phase-space $(x,v) \in \mathbb T_x^n \times \mathbb R^n_v$. The goal is four-fold: (A) to understand how collisions suppress plasma echoes and enable Landau damping in agreement with linearized theory in Sobolev spaces, (B) to understand how phase mixing accelerates collisional relaxation, (C) to understand better how the plasma returns to global equilibrium during Landau damping, and (D) to rule out that collision-driven nonlinear instabilities dominate. We give an estimate for the scaling law between Knudsen number and the maximal size of the perturbation necessary for linear theory to be accurate in Sobolev regularity. We conjecture this scaling to be sharp (up to logarithmic corrections) due to potential nonlinear echoes in the collisionless model.