Liouville Equation and the Resolvent Formalism

Abstract

With the use of the Prigogine and Balescu representation for the description of relaxation starting from the Liouville equation, we apply Van Hove's resolvent formalism to obtain higher‐order contributions for classical weakly coupled homogeneous gases. These results confirm Van Hove's observation that, for appropriate representations, persistent (long time) effects are determined by diagonal matrix elements of operators consisting of products of perturbative operators separated by diagonal operators. The mechanism of relaxation is also discussed.