This paper proves the nonlinear asymptotic stability of the Lane-Emden solutions for spherically symmetric motions of viscous gaseous stars if the adiabatic constant γ lies in the stability range (4/3, 2). It is shown that for small perturbations of a LaneEmden solution with same mass, there exists a unique global (in time) strong solution to the vacuum free boundary problem of the compressible Navier-Stokes-Poisson system with spherical symmetry for viscous stars, and the solution captures the precise physical behavior that the sound speed is C 1/2 -H¨older continuous across the vacuum boundary provided that γ lies in (4/3, 2). The key is to establish the global-in-time regularity uniformly up to the vacuum boundary, which ensures the large time asymptotic uniform convergence of the evolving vacuum boundary, density and velocity to those of the Lane-Emden solution with detailed convergence rates, and detailed large time behaviors of solutions near the vacuum boundary. In particular, it is shown that every spherical surface moving with the fluid converges to the sphere enclosing the same mass inside the domain of the Lane-Emden solution with a uniform convergence rate and the large time asymptotic states for the vacuum free boundary problem (1.1.2) are determined by the initial mass distribution and the total mass. To overcome the difficulty caused by the degeneracy and singular behavior near the vacuum free boundary and coordinates singularity at the symmetry center, the main ingredients of the analysis consist of combinations of some new weighted nonlinear functionals (involving both lower-order and higher-order derivatives) and space-time weighted energy estimates. The constructions of these weighted nonlinear functionals and space-time weights depend crucially on the structures of the Lane-Emden solution, the balance of pressure and gravitation, and the dissipation. Finally, the uniform boundedness of the acceleration of the vacuum boundary is also proved.

For the physical vacuum free boundary problem with the sound speed being C 1/2 - H¨older continuous near vacuum boundaries of the compressible Euler equations with damping, the global existence of solutions and convergence to Barenblatt self-similar solutions of the porous media equation was recently proved in [34] for 1-d motions by Luo and the author. This paper generalizes the results for 1-d motions to 3-d spherically symmetric motions. Compared with the 1-d theory, besides the high degeneracy of the equations near the physical vacuum boundary, the analytical difficulties lie in the complexity of equations and the coordinates singularity in the center of symmetry which is resolved by constructing suitable weights. The results obtained in this work contribute to the theory of global solutions to free boundary problems of compressible inviscid fluids in the presence of vacuum states, for which the currently available results are mainly for the local-in-time well-posedness theory, also to the theory of global smooth solutions of dissipative hyperbolic systems which fail to be strictly hyperbolic.

We study free scalar field theory on a graph, which gives rise to a modified version of discrete Green’s function on a graph studied in [8]. We show that this gives rise to a graph invariant, which is closely related to the 2-dimensional Weisfeiler-Lehman algorithm for graph isomorphism testing. We then consider the same theory over the integers, which leads to the consideration of certain quadratic forms over the integers as initiated in [14], associated to the graphs. The quadratic form represented by the combinatorial Laplacian respects a well-behaved wedge sum of graphs, and appears to capture important graph properties reg