Exponential trend to equilibrium for the inelastic Boltzmann equationdriven by a particle bath

We consider the spatially homogeneous Boltzmann equation for inelastic hard spheres (with constant restitution coefficient $α\in (0,1)$) under the thermalization induced by a host medium with a fixed Maxwellian distribution. We prove that the solution to the associated initial-value problem converges exponentially fast towards the unique equilibrium solution. The proof combines a careful spectral analysis of the linearised semigroup as well as entropy estimates. The trend towards equilibrium holds in the weakly inelastic regime in which $α$ is close to $1$, and the rate of convergence is explicit and depends solely on the spectral gap of the \emph{elastic} linearised collision operator.

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