The Vlasov-Maxwell-Boltzmann system near Maxwellians

Perhaps the most fundamental model for dynamics of dilute charged particles is described by the Vlasov-Maxwell-Boltzmann system, in which particles interact with themselves through collisions and with their self-consistent electromagnetic field. Despite its importance, no global in time solutions, weak or strong, have been constructed so far. It is shown in this article that any initially smooth, periodic small perturbation of a given global Maxwellian, which preserves the same mass, total momentum and reduced total energy (22), leads to a unique global in time classical solution for such a master system. The construction is based on a recent nonlinear energy method with a new a priori estimate for the dissipation: the linear collision operator L, not its time integration, is positive definite for any solution f(t, x, v) with small amplitude to the Vlasov-Maxwell-Boltzmann system (8) and (12). As a by-product, such an estimate also yields an exponential decay for the simpler Viasov-Poisson-Boltzmann system (24).