Fluctuating Kinetic Theory: A Poissonian Stochastic Boltzmann Equation

Abstract

We introduce a nonlinear Poissonian fluctuating Boltzmann equation whose noise encodes both the fluctuations and the path large-deviation rate function of the underlying hard-sphere gas. Unlike the Gaussian-noise equations commonly studied in fluctuating hydrodynamics, the present equation raises a new difficulty: a Poisson random measure produces jumps that may destroy the nonnegativity of the solution. To address this problem, we construct a finite-dimensional coarse-grained jump process and prove its well-posedness and nonnegativity. For each fixed mesh, this process satisfies a good path large-deviation principle. We then fix a regularized velocity cutoff and study the asymptotic behavior of the discrete rate functions as the mesh is refined. On a class of biased regular paths, their limit is the corresponding cutoff Boltzmann large-deviation rate function associated with the hard-sphere gas. This establishes the consistency of the coarse-grained fluctuating Boltzmann model with the underlying particle system at the level of path large deviations.