Global existence and decay estimates of the Boltzmann equation with frictional force: The general results

In this paper, we give the existence theory and the optimal time convergence rates of the solutions to the Boltzmann equation with frictional force near a global Maxwellian. We generalize our previous results on the same problem for hard sphere model into both hard potential and soft potential case. The main method used in this paper is the classic energy method combined with some new time–velocity weight functions to control the large velocity growth in the nonlinear term for the case of interactions with hard potentials and to deal with the singularity of the cross-section at zero relative velocity for the soft potential case.