On strong local alignment in the kinetic Cucker-Smale model

In two recent papers the authors study the existence of weak solutions and the hydrodynamic limit of kinetic flocking equations with strong local alignment. The introduction of a strong local alignment term to model flocking behavior was formally motivated in these papers as a limiting case of an alignment term proposed by Motsch and Tadmor. In this paper, we rigorously justify this limit, and show that the considered equation is indeed a limit of the Motsch-Tadmor model when the radius of interaction goes to zero. The analysis involves velocity averaging lemmas and several $L^p$ estimates.