Hypocoercivity for a BGK model for gas mixtures

Abstract: We consider a kinetic model for a two component gas mixture without chemical reactions. Our goal is to study hypocoercivity for the linearized BGK model for gas mixtures in continuous phase space. By constructing an entropy functional, we can prove exponential relaxation to equilibrium with explicit rates. Our strategy is based on the entropy and spectral methods adapting Lyapunov's direct method as presented in [Achleitner-Arnold-Carlen, 2016] for the one species linearized BGK model. In comparison to the one species case, we start with two partial differential equations, one for each species. These equations are coupled due to interspecies interactions, which requires additional estimates on these interspecies terms.