  This paper is devoted the the study of the mean field limit for many-particle
systems undergoing jump, drift or diffusion processes, as well as combinations
of them. The main results are quantitative estimates on the decay of
fluctuations around the deterministic limit and of correlations between
particles, as the number of particles goes to infinity. To this end we
introduce a general functional framework which reduces this question to the one
of proving a purely functional estimate on some abstract generator operators
(consistency estimate) together with fine stability estimates on the flow of
the limiting nonlinear equation (stability estimates). Then we apply this
method to a Boltzmann collision jump process (for Maxwell molecules), to a
McKean-Vlasov drift-diffusion process and to an inelastic Boltzmann collision
jump process with (stochastic) thermal bath. To our knowledge, our approach
yields the first such quantitative results for a combination of jump and
diffusion processes.
