Statistical dynamics of a hard sphere gas: fluctuating Boltzmann equation and large deviations

Abstract

We present a mathematical theory of dynamical fluctuations for the hard sphere gas in the Boltzmann-Grad limit. We prove that (1) fluctuations of the empirical measure from the solution of the Boltzmann equation, scaled with the square root of the average number of particles, converge to a Gaussian process driven by the fluctuating Boltzmann equation, as predicted by Spohn; (2) large deviations are exponentially small in the average number of particles and are characterized, under regularity assumptions, by a large deviation functional as previously obtained by Rezakhanlou for dynamics with stochastic collisions. The results are valid away from thermal equilibrium, but only for short times. Our strategy is based on uniform a priori bounds on the cumulant generating function, characterizing the fine structure of the small correlations.