On uniqueness and stability for the Enskog equation

Abstract: The time-evolution of a moderately dense gas in a vacuum is described in classical mechanics by a particle density function obtained from the Enskog equation. Based on a McKean-Vlasov stochastic equation with jumps, the associated stochastic process was recently studied in \cite{ARS17}. The latter work was extended in \cite{FRS18} to the case of general hard and soft potentials without Grad's angular cut-off assumption. By the introduction of a shifted distance that exactly compensates for the free transport term that accrues in the spatially inhomogeneous setting, we prove in this work an inequality on the Wasserstein distance for any two measure-valued solutions to the Enskog equation. As a particular consequence, we find sufficient conditions for the uniqueness and continuous-dependence on initial data for solutions to the Enskog equation applicable to hard and soft potentials without angular cut-off.