Landau damping in mixed hyperbolic-kinetic systems and thick sprays

Abstract: This article is devoted to the study of a model of thick sprays which combines the Vlasov equation for the particles and the barotropic compressible Euler equations to describe the fluid, coupled through the gradient of the pressure of the fluid. We prove that sound waves interact with particles of nearby velocities, which results in a damping or an amplification of these sound waves, depending on the sign of the derivative of the distribution function at the sound speed. This mechanism is very similar to the classical Landau damping which occurs in the Vlasov-Poisson system. If the sound waves are amplified then the thick spray model is linearly ill-posed in Sobolev spaces, even locally in time. We also show that such Landau damping type phenomena naturally arise when we couple an hyperbolic system of conservation laws with the Vlasov equation.