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Abstract We study a class of fourth order nonlinear parabolic equations which include the thin-film equation and the quantum drift-diffusion model as special cases. We investigate these equations by first developing functional inequalities of the type $$ \int_\Omega u^{2\gamma-\alpha-\beta}\Delta\ua\Delta\ub dx \geq c\int_\Omega|\Delta \ur |^2dx, $$ which seem to be of interest on their own right.

We investigate the nonlinear stability of the superposition of a viscous contact wave and two rarefaction waves for a one-dimensional (1D) bipolar Vlasov--Poisson--Boltzmann (VPB) system, which can be used to describe the transportation of charged particles under the additional electrostatic potential force. Based on a new micro-macro type of decomposition around the local Maxwellian related to the bipolar VPB system in the previous work [H.-L. Li, Y. Wang, T. Yang, and M.-Y. Zhong, <i>Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal.</i>, 228 (2018), pp. 39--127], we prove that the superposition of a viscous contact wave and two rarefaction waves is time-asymptotically stable to the 1D bipolar VPB system under some smallness conditions on the initial perturbations and wave strength, which implies that this typical superposition wave pattern is nonlinearly stable under the combined effects of the binary collisions, the electrostatic potential

In this note, we prove a sharp lower bound for the log canonical threshold of a plurisubharmonic function $${\varphi}$$ with an isolated singularity at 0 in an open subset of $${\mathbb{C}^n}$$ . This threshold is defined as the supremum of constants$c$> 0 such that $${e^{-2c\varphi}}$$ is integrable on a neighborhood of 0. We relate $${c(\varphi)}$$ to the intermediate multiplicity numbers $${e_j(\varphi)}$$ , defined as the Lelong numbers of $${(dd^c\varphi)^j}$$ at 0 (so that in particular $${e_0(\varphi)=1}$$ ). Our main result is that $${c(\varphi)\geqslant\sum_{j=0}^{n-1} e_j(\varphi)/e_{j+1}(\varphi)}$$ . This inequality is shown to be sharp; it simultaneously improves the classical result $${c(\varphi)\geqslant 1/e_1(\varphi)}$$ due to Skoda, as well as the lower estimate $${c(\varphi)\geqslant n/e_n(\varphi)^{1/n}}$$ which has received crucial applications to birational geometry in recent years. The proof consists in a reduction to the toric case, i.e. singularities arising from monomial ideals.

The singular parabolic problem $u_t-\triangle u=\l{\frac{1+\d|\nabla u|^2}{(1-u)^2}}$ on a bounded domain $\O$ of $\Rn$ with Dirichlet boundary condition, models the Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) device with fringing field. In this paper, we focus on the quenching behavior of the solution to this equation. We first show that there exists a critical value $\l_\d^*>0$ such that if $0<\l<\l_\d^*$, all solutions exist globally; while for $\l>\l_\d^*$, all the solution will quench in finite time. The estimate of the quenching time in terms of large voltage $\l$ is investigated. Furthermore, the quenching set is a compact subset of $\O$, provided $\O$ is a convex bounded domain in $\mathbb{R}^n$. In particular, if the domain $\O$ is radially symmetric, then the origin is the only quenching point. We not only derive the one-side estimate of the quenching rate, but also further study the refined asymptotic behavior of the finite quenching solution.