In this paper, we establish the local existence and uniqueness of multi-dimensional contact discontinuities for the ideal compressible magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) in Sobolev spaces, which are most typical interfacial waves for astrophysical plasmas and prototypical fundamental waves for hyperbolic systems of conservation laws. Such waves are characteristic discontinuities for which there is no flow across the discontinuity surface while the magnetic field crosses transversely, which lead to a two-phase free boundary problem where the pressure, velocity and magnetic field are continuous across the interface whereas the entropy and density may have jumps. To overcome the difficulties of possible nonlinear Rayleigh--Taylor instability and loss of derivatives, here we use crucially the Lagrangian formulation and the Cauchy formula (1882) for the magnetic field. This enables us to capture the boundary regularizing effect of the transversal magnetic field on the flow map, and on the other hand, it allows us to define a special good unknown of the magnetic field to get around the troublesome boundary integrals due to the transversality of the magnetic field. In particular, our result removes the additional assumption of the Rayleigh--Taylor sign condition required by Morando, Tarkhinin and Trebeschi (\emph{J. Differential Equations} \textbf{258} (2015), no. 7, 2531--2571; \emph{Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal.} \textbf{228} (2018), no. 2, 697--742) and holds for both 2D and 3D and hence gives a complete answer to the two open questions raised therein. Moreover, there is {\it no loss of derivatives} in our well-posedness theory. The solution is constructed as {\it the inviscid limit} of solutions to well-chosen nonlinear approximate problems for the two-phase compressible viscous non-resistive MHD.

Due to the highly degeneracy and singularities of the entropy equation, the physical entropy for viscous and heat conductive polytropic gases behave singularly in the presence of vacuum and it is thus a challenge to study its dynamics. It is shown in this paper that the uniform boundedness of the entropy and the inhomogeneous Sobolev regularities of the velocity and temperature can be propagated for viscous and heat conductive gases in $\mathbb R^3$, provided that the initial vacuum occurs only at far fields with suitably slow decay of the initial density. Precisely, it is proved that for any strong solution to the Cauchy problem of the heat conductive compressible Navier--Stokes equations, the corresponding entropy keeps uniformly bounded and the $L^2$ regularities of the velocity and temperature can be propagated, up to the existing time of the solution, as long as the initial density vanishes only at far fields with a rate no more than $O(\frac{1}{|x|^2})$. The main tools are some singularly weighted energy estimates and an elaborate De Giorgi type iteration technique. The De Giorgi type iterations are carried out to different equations in establishing the lower and upper bounds of the entropy.

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.

In this paper, we provide rigorous justification of the hydrostatic approximation and the derivation of primitive equations as the small aspect ratio limit of the incompressible three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations in the anisotropic horizontal viscosity regime. Setting $\varepsilon >0$ to be the small aspect ratio of the vertical to the horizontal scales of the domain, we investigate the case when the horizontal and vertical viscosities in the incompressible three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations are of orders $O(1)$ and $O(\varepsilon^\alpha)$, respectively, with $\alpha>2$, for which the limiting system is the primitive equations with only horizontal viscosity as $\varepsilon$ tends to zero. In particular we show that for ``well prepared" initial data the solutions of the scaled incompressible three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations converge strongly, in any finite interval of time, to the corresponding solutions of the anisotropic primitive equations with only horizontal viscosities, as $\varepsilon$ tends to zero, and that the convergence rate is of order $O\left(\varepsilon^\frac\beta2\right)$, where $\beta=\min\{\alpha-2,2\}$. Note that this result is different from the case $\alpha=2$ studied in [Li, J.; Titi, E.S.: \emph{The primitive equations as the small aspect ratio limit of the Navier-Stokes equations: Rigorous justification of the hydrostatic approximation}, J. Math. Pures Appl., \textbf{124} \rm(2019), 30--58], where the limiting system is the primitive equations with full viscosities and the convergence is globally in time and its rate of order $O\left(\varepsilon\right)$.

In this paper, we consider the initial boundary value problem in a cylindrical domain to the three dimensional primitive equations with full eddy viscosity in the momentum equations but with only horizontal eddy diffusivity in the temperature equation. Global well-posedness of $z$-weak solution is established for any such initial datum that itself and its vertical derivative belong to $L^2$. This not only extends the results in \cite{Cao5} from the spatially periodic case to general cylindrical domains but also weakens the regularity assumptions on the initial data which are required to be $H^2$ there.