Global existence for an isotropic modification of the Boltzmann equation

Motivated by the open problem of large-data global existence for the non-cutoff Boltzmann equation, we introduce a model equation that in some sense disregards the anisotropy of the Boltzmann collision kernel. We refer to this model equation as isotropic Boltzmann by analogy with the isotropic Landau equation introduced by Krieger and Strain (2012) [35]. The collision operator of our isotropic Boltzmann model converges to the isotropic Landau collision operator under a scaling limit that is analogous to the grazing collisions limit connecting (true) Boltzmann with (true) Landau. Our main result is global existence for the isotropic Boltzmann equation in the space homogeneous case, for certain parts of the “very soft potentials” regime in which global existence is unknown for the space homogeneous Boltzmann equation. The proof strategy is inspired by the work of Gualdani and Guillen (2022) [22] on isotropic Landau, and makes use of recent progress on weighted fractional Hardy inequalities.