A collision-oriented interacting particle system for Landau-type equations and the molecular chaos

Abstract

We propose a collision-oriented particle system to approximate a class of Landau-type equations. This particle system is formally derived from a particle system with random collisions in the grazing regime, and happens to be a special random batch system with random interaction in the diffusion coefficient. The difference from usual random batch systems with random interaction in the drift is that the batch size has to be $p=2$. We then analyze the convergence rate of the proposed particle system to the Landau-type equations using the tool of relative entropy, assuming that the interaction kernels are regular enough. A key aspect of our approach is the gradient estimates of logarithmic densities, applied to both the Landau-type equations and the particle systems. Compared to existing particle systems for the approximation of Landau-type equations, our proposed system not only offers a more intrinsic reflection of the underlying physics but also reduces the computational cost to $O(N)$ per time step when implemented numerically.