Well-posedness and trend to equilibrium for the Vlasov-Poisson-Fokker-Planck system with a confining potential

Abstract: We study well-posedness and long time behavior of the nonlinear Vlasov-Poisson- Fokker-Planck system with an external confining potential. The system describes the time evolution of particles (e.g.$\,\,$in a plasma) undergoing diffusion, friction and Coulomb interaction. We prove existence and uniqueness of mild solutions in a weighted Sobolev space. Moreover, we prove that the solutions converge to the global equilibrium exponentially. Our results hold for a wide class of external potentials and the estimates on the rate of convergence are explicit and constructive. The technique is based on the construction of Lyapunov functionals, new short and long time estimates for the linearized system, and fixed point arguments.