  Uniform shear flow is a paradigmatic example of a nonequilibrium fluid state
exhibiting non-Newtonian behavior. It is characterized by uniform density and
temperature and a linear velocity profile $U_x(y)=a y$, where $a$ is the
constant shear rate. In the case of a rarefied gas, all the relevant physical
information is represented by the one-particle velocity distribution function
$f({\bf r},{\bf v})=f({\bf V})$, with ${\bf V}\equiv {\bf v}-{\bf U}({\bf r})$,
which satisfies the standard nonlinear integro-differential Boltzmann equation.
We have studied this state for a two-dimensional gas of Maxwell molecules with
grazing collisions in which the nonlinear Boltzmann collision operator reduces
to a Fokker-Planck operator. We have found analytically that for shear rates
larger than a certain threshold value the velocity distribution function
exhibits an algebraic high-velocity tail of the form $f({\bf V};a)\sim |{\bf
V}|^{-4-\sigma(a)}\Phi(\phi; a)$, where $\phi\equiv \tan V_y/V_x$ and the
angular distribution function $\Phi(\phi; a)$ is the solution of a modified
Mathieu equation. The enforcement of the periodicity condition $\Phi(\phi;
a)=\Phi(\phi+\pi; a)$ allows one to obtain the exponent $\sigma(a)$ as a
function of the shear rate. As a consequence of this power-law decay, all the
velocity moments of a degree equal to or larger than $2+\sigma(a)$ are
divergent. In the high-velocity domain the velocity distribution is highly
anisotropic, with the angular distribution sharply concentrated around a
preferred orientation angle which rotates counterclock-wise as the shear rate
increases.
