Young Researchers Workshop: Current trends in kinetic theory

Sensitivity analysis and uniform regularity for the Vlasov-Poisson-Fokker-Planck system with uncertainty and multiple scales

Yuhua Zhu

University of Wisconsin-Madison

We study the Vlasov-Poisson-Fokker-Planck system with uncertainty and multiple scales. Here the uncertainty, modeled by random variables, enters the solution through initial data, while the multiple scales lead the system to its high-field or parabolic regimes. With the help of proper Lyapunov-type inequalities, under some mild conditions on the initial data, the regularity of the solution in the random space, as well as exponential decay of the solution to the global Maxwellian, are established under Sobolev norms, which are uniform in terms of the scaling parameters. These are the first hypocoercivity results for a nonlinear kinetic system with random input, which are important for the understanding of the sensitivity of the system under random perturbations, and for the establishment of spectral convergence of popular numerical methods for uncertainty quantification based on (spectrally accurate) polynomial chaos expansions.