Substochastic semigroups for transport equations with conservative boundary conditions

Abstract.

We consider the free streaming operator associated with conservative boundary conditions. It is known that this operator (with its usual domain) admits an extension A which generates a C ₀-semigroup $(V_H (t))_{t \geqslant 0}$ in L ¹. With techniques borrowed from the additive perturbation theory of substochastic semigroups, we describe precisely its domain and provide necessary and sufficient conditions ensuring $(V_H (t))_{t \geqslant 0}$ to be stochastic. We apply these results to examples from kinetic theory.