Relative Entropy Method for Particle Approximation of the Landau Equation for Maxwellian Molecules

Abstract: We derive the spatially homogeneous Landau equation for Maxwellian molecules from a natural stochastic interacting particle system. More precisely, we control the relative entropy between the joint law of the particle system and the tensorized law of the Landau equation. To obtain this, we establish as key tools the pointwise logarithmic gradient and Hessian estimates of the density function and also a new Law of Large Numbers result for the particle system. The logarithmic estimates are derived via the Bernstein method and the parabolic maximum principle, while the Law of Large Numbers result comes from crucial observations on the control of moments at the particle level.