Time-Local Solvability of the Degond--Lucquin-Desreux--Morrow Model for Gas Discharge

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate mathematically the fundamental mechanism of gas discharge. Townsend discovered that $\alpha$- and $\gamma$-mechanisms are essential for a gas ionization process. Morrow, Degond, and Lucquin-Desreux derived a mathematical model taking these two mechanisms into account. This model consists of nonlinear hyperbolic, parabolic, and elliptic partial differential equations. In this paper, we establish a framework for analyzing this model rigorously, because no mathematical result has been announced. More precisely, we show the unique existence of a time-local solution to an initial-boundary value problem over an unbounded domain. The main difficulty of this problem lies in the fact that the direction of boundary characteristics of a hyperbolic equation degenerates at infinite distance. Generally speaking, the regularity of solutions to linearized hyperbolic equations with degenerate boundary characteristics may be lost near the boundary. This implies the possibility that loss on the derivatives arises at each step of the inductive scheme to solve the nonlinear problem. We first use the weighted Sobolev spaces in the construction of solutions to make clear the direction of characteristics. Furthermore, we reduce the initial-boundary value problem for the hyperbolic equation to an initial value problem by applying several extension operators. This reduction enables us to avoid the loss on the derivatives.