Uniqueness in the weakly inelastic regime of the equilibrium state to the Boltzmann equation driven by a particle bath

We consider the spatially homogeneous Boltzmann equation for inelastic hard-spheres (with constant restitution coefficient α ∈ (0, 1)) under the thermalization induced by a host medium with a fixed Maxwellian distribution. We prove uniqueness of the stationary solution (with given mass) in the weakly inelastic regime, i.e., for any inelasticity parameter α ∈ (α 0, 1), with some constructive α 0 ∈ [0, 1). Our analysis is based on a perturbative argument which uses the knowledge of the stationary solution in the elastic limit and quantitative estimates of the convergence of stationary solutions as the inelasticity parameter goes to 1. In order to achieve this proof we give an accurate spectral analysis of the associated linearized collision operator in the elastic limit. Several qualitative properties of this unique steady state F α are also derived; in particular, we prove that F α is bounded from above and from below by two explicit universal (i.e., independent of α) Maxwellian distributions. © 2011 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.