Instantaneous Exponential Ill-posedness of the BGK Model in a Half-Space with Inflow Boundary Conditions

Abstract

In this paper, we study boundary-driven behavior of the BGK model and the Boltzmann equation in a half-space with vacuum initial data. For any $1\leqβ\leq2$ and $α>0$, we construct a unique local-in-time BGK solution whose inflow boundary data have an arbitrarily small norm with the tangential exponential weight $e^{α|v_h|^β}$, but whose norm with weight $e^{α'|v_h|^β}$ is infinite for every $0<α'\leqα$ and every positive time of existence, where $v=(v_h,v_z)\in\mathbb{R}^n$ and $v_h\in\mathbb{R}^{n-1}$ denotes the tangential velocity. Thus, this BGK solution instantaneously leaves the exponentially weighted spaces associated with the inflow data, even when the exponential weight is weakened. The construction relies on sharp estimates for the density, bulk velocity, and temperature on a singular scale together with a fixed-point argument in a time-dependent anisotropic space. For comparison, we establish local existence and uniqueness for the cutoff Boltzmann equation under isotropic exponential weights $e^{α|v|^β}$. In the Appendix, we further clarify the role of these different weights by showing that the macroscopic stability required for the BGK construction can fail even for Maxwellian inflow data and that it can be recovered by suitably weakening the normal velocity decay of the inflow data. These observations highlight a structural difference between local Maxwellian relaxation and the Boltzmann collision operator in the presence of boundary inflow and vacuum initial data. This work extends the whole-space analysis of D. Lee, S. Park, and S.-B. Yun \cite{LPY2024} to the half-space setting.