1 Introduction to Kinetic Theory

In general relativity, kinetic theory has been used relatively sparsely to model phenomenological matter in comparison to fluid models. From a mathematical point of view, however, there are fundamental advantages to using a kinetic description. In non-curved spacetimes kinetic theory has been studied intensively as a mathematical subject during several decades, and it has also played an important role from an engineering point of view. In the first part of this introduction, we will review kinetic theory in non-curved spacetimes and we will consider mainly the special relativistic case, but mathematical results in the nonrelativistic case will also be discussed. We believe that a good understanding of kinetic theory in non-curved spacetimes is fundamental to good comprehension of kinetic theory in general relativity. Moreover, it is often the case that mathematical methods used to treat the Einstein–Vlasov system are carried over from methods developed in the special relativistic or nonrelativistic case.

The purpose of kinetic theory is to model the time evolution of a collection of particles. The particles may be entirely different objects depending on the physical situation. For instance, the particles are atoms and molecules in a neutral gas or electrons and ions in a plasma. In stellar dynamics the particles are stars and in a cosmological case they are galaxies or even clusters of galaxies. Mathematical models of particle systems are most frequently described by kinetic or fluid equations. A characteristic feature of kinetic theory is that its models are statistical and the particle systems are described by distribution functions , which represent the density of particles with given spacetime position and momentum . A distribution function contains a wealth of information, and macroscopical quantities are easily calculated from this function. In a fluid model the quantities that describe the system do not depend on the momentum but only on the spacetime point . A choice of model is usually made with regard to the physical properties of interest for the system or with regard to numerical considerations. It should be mentioned that a fluid model that is too naive may give rise to shell-crossing singularities, which are unphysical. In a kinetic description such phenomena are ruled out.

The time evolution of the system is determined by the interactions between the particles which depend on the physical situation. For instance, the driving mechanism for the time evolution of a neutral gas is the collision between particles (the relativistic Boltzmann equation). For a plasma the interaction is through the electric charges (the Vlasov–Maxwell system), and in the stellar and cosmological cases the interaction is gravitational (the Einstein–Vlasov system). Of course, combinations of interaction processes are also considered but in many situations one of them is strongly dominating and the weaker processes are neglected.