We justify the smoothing effect for measure valued solutions to the space homogeneous Boltzmann equation of Maxwellian type cross sections. This is the first rigorous proof of the smoothing effect for any measure valued initial data except the single Dirac mass, which gives the optimal description on the regularity of solutions for positive time, caused by the singularity in the cross section. The main new ingredient in the proof is the introduction of a time degenerate coercivity estimate by using the microlocal analysis.

To study the non-linear stability of a non-trivial profile for a multi-dimensional systems of gas dynamics, the combination of the Green function on estimating the lower order derivatives and the energy method for the higher order derivatives is shown to be not only useful but sometimes maybe also essential. In this paper, we study the stability of a planar diffusion wave for the isentropic Euler equations with damping in two-dimensional space. By introducing an approximate Green function for the linearized equations around the planar diffusion wave and by applying the energy method, we prove the global existence and the L 2 convergence rate of the solution when the initial data is a small perturbation of the planar diffusion wave. The decay rates of the perturbation and its lower order spatial derivatives obtained are optimal in the L 2 norm. Furthermore, the constructed approximate Green function in this paper can be

In this paper, the L p convergence rates of planar diffusion waves for multi-dimensional Euler equations with damping are considered. The analysis relies on a newly introduced frequency decomposition and Green function based energy method. It is a combination of the L p estimate on the low frequency component by using an approximate Green function and L 2 estimate on the high frequency component through the energy method. By noticing that the low frequency component in the approximate Green function has the algebraic decay which governs the large time behavior, while the high frequency component has the exponential decay but with singularity, their combination leads to a global algebraic decay estimate. To use the decay property only of the low frequency component in the approximate Green function avoids the singularity in the high frequency component so that it simplifies and improves the

For the Boltzmann equation with an external force in the form of the gradient of a potential function in space variable, the stability of its stationary solutions as local Maxwellians was studied by S. Ukai et al. (2005) through the energy method. Based on this stability analysis and some techniques on analyzing the convergence rates to station- ary solutions for the compressible Navier-Stokes equations, in this paper, we study the convergence rate to the above stationary solutions for the Boltzmann equation which is a fundamental equation in statistical physics for non-equilibrium rarefied gas. By combining the dissipation from the viscosity and heat conductivity on the fluid components and the dissipation on the non-fluid component through the celebrated H-theorem, a convergence rate of the same order as the one for the compressible Navier-Stokes is obtained by constructing some

There are many open problems on the stability of nonlinear wave patterns to the Boltzmann equation even though the corresponding stability theory has been comparatively well-established for the gas dynamical systems. In this paper, we study the nonlinear stability of a rarefaction wave profile to the Boltzmann equation with the boundary effect imposed by specular reflection for both the hard sphere model and the hard potential model with angular cut-off. The analysis is based on the property of the solution and its derivatives which are either odd or even functions at the boundary coming from specular reflection, and the decomposition on both the solution and the Boltzmann equation introduced in [24, 26] for energy method.