The Enskog process for hard and soft potentials

Abstract

The density of a moderately dense gas evolving in a vacuum is given by the solution of an Enskog equation. Recently we have constructed in Albeverio et al. (J Stat Phys 167:90–122, 2017) the stochastic process that corresponds to the Enskog equation under suitable conditions. The Enskog process is identified as the solution of a McKean–Vlasov equation driven by a Poisson random measure. In this work, we continue the study for a wider class of collision kernels that includes hard and soft potentials. Based on a suitable particle approximation of binary collisions, the existence of an Enskog process is established.