The uniqueness of positive solutions to some semilinear elliptic systems with variational structure arising from mathematical physics is proved. The key ingredient of the proof is the oscillatory behavior of solutions to linearized equations for cooperative semilinear elliptic systems of two equations on one-dimensional domains, and it is shown that the stability of the positive solutions for such semilinear system is closely related to the oscillatory behavior.

In this paper, we consider the Cauchy problem to the planar non-resistive magnetohydrodynamic equations without heat conductivity, and establish the global well-posedness of strong solutions with large initial data. The key ingredient of the proof is to establish the a priori estimates on the effective viscous flux and a newly introduced ``transverse effective viscous flux" vector field inducted by the transverse magnetic field. The initial density is assumed only to be uniformly bounded and of finite mass and, in particular, the vacuum and discontinuities of the density are allowed.

The main purpose of the present paper is to investigate the nonlinear stability of viscous shock waves and rarefaction waves for the bipolar VlasovPoissonBoltzmann (VPB) system. To this end, motivated by the micromacro decomposition to the Boltzmann equation in Liu and Yu (Commun Math Phys 246:133179, 2004) and Liu etal. (Physica D 188:178192, 2004), we first set up a new micromacro decomposition around the local Maxwellian related to the bipolar VPB system and give a unified framework to study the nonlinear stability of the basic wave patterns to the system. Then, as applications of this new decomposition, the time-asymptotic stability of the two typical nonlinear wave patterns, viscous shock waves and rarefaction waves are proved for the 1D bipolar VPB system. More precisely, it is first proved that the linear superposition of two Boltzmann shock profiles in the first and third

This is a continuation of the paper [15] on nonlinear boundary layers of the Boltzmann equation where the existence is established and shown to be strongly dependent on the Mach number <i>M</i> ^<i></i> of the Maxwellian state at far field. In this paper, when <i>M</i> ^<i></i>&lt;1, we will show that the linearized operator has the exponential decay in time property and therefore a bootstrapping argument yields nonlinear stability of the boundary layers.

This paper is devoted to a functional analytic approach to the subelliptic oblique derivative problem for the usual Laplacian with a complex parameter λ. We solve the long-standing open problem of the asymptotic eigenvalue distribution for the homogeneous oblique derivative problem when |λ| tends to ∞. We prove the spectral properties of the closed realization of the Laplacian similar to the elliptic (non-degenerate) case. In the proof we make use of Boutet de Monvel calculus in order to study the resolvents and their adjoints in the framework of L2 Sobolev spaces.