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We study the stability of traveling waves of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation with nonzero condition at infinity obtained via a constrained variational approach. Two important physical models for this are the Gross–Pitaevskii (GP) equation and the cubic-quintic equation. First, under a non-degeneracy condition we prove a sharp instability criterion for 3D traveling waves of (GP), which had been conjectured in the physical literature. This result is also extended for general nonlinearity and higher dimensions, including 4D (GP) and 3D cubic-quintic equations. Second, for cubic-quintic type nonlinearity, we construct slow traveling waves and prove their nonlinear instability in any dimension. For dimension two, the non-degeneracy condition is also proved for these slow traveling waves. For general traveling waves without vortices (that is nonvanishing) and with general nonlinearity in any dimension, we find a sharp condition for linear instability. Third, we prove that any 2D traveling wave of (GP) is transversally unstable, and we find the sharp interval of unstable transversal wave numbers. Near unstable traveling waves of all of the above cases, we construct unstable and stable invariant manifolds.

The time evolution of the distribution function for the charged particles in a dilute gas is governed by the VlasovPoissonBoltzmann system when the force is self-induced and its potential function satisfies the Poisson equation. In this paper, we give a satisfactory global existence theory of classical solutions to this system when the initial data is a small perturbation of a global Maxwellian. Moreover, the convergence rate in time to the global Maxwellian is also obtained through the energy method. The proof is based on the theory of compressible NavierStokes equations with forcing and the decomposition of the solutions to the Boltzmann equation with respect to the local Maxwellian introduced in [23] and elaborated in [31].

We propose a conservation-dissipation formalism (CDF) for coarse-grained descriptions of irreversible processes. This formalism is based on a stability criterion for non-equilibrium thermodynamics. The criterion ensures that non-equilibrium states tend to equilibrium in long time. As a systematic methodology, CDF provides a feasible procedure in choosing non-equilibrium state variables and determining their evolution equations. The equations derived in CDF have a unified elegant form. They are globally hyperbolic, allow a convenient definition of weak solutions, and are amenable to existing numerics. More importantly, CDF is a genuinely nonlinear formalism and works for systems far away from equilibrium. With this formalism, we formulate novel thermodynamics theories for heat conduction in rigid bodies and non-isothermal compressible Maxwell fluid flows as two typical examples. In these examples, the non-equilibrium variables are exactly the conjugate variables of the heat fluxes or stress tensors. The new theory generalizes Cattaneo’s law or Maxwell’s law in a regularized and nonlinear fashion.

The nonlinear asymptotic stability of Lane-Emden solutions is proved in this paper for spherically symmetric motions of viscous gaseous stars with the density dependent shear and bulk viscosities which vanish at the vacuum, when the adiabatic exponent γ lies in the stability regime (4/3, 2), by establishing the global-in-time regularity uniformly up to the vacuum boundary for the vacuum free boundary problem of the compressible Navier-Stokes-Poisson systems with spherical symmetry, which ensures the global existence of strong solutions capturing the precise physical behavior that the sound speed is C1/2-Hölder continuous across the vacuum boundary, the large time asymptotic uniform convergence of the evolving vacuum boundary, density and velocity to those of Lane-Emden solutions with detailed convergence rates, and the detailed large time behavior of solutions near the vacuum boundary. Those uniform convergence are of fundamental importance in the study of vacuum free boundary problems which are missing in the previous results for global weak solutions. Moreover, the results obtained in this paper apply to much broader cases of viscosities than those in Fang and Zhang (Arch Ration Mech Anal 191:195–243, 2009) for the theory of weak solutions when the adiabatic exponent γ lies in the most physically relevant range. Finally, this paper extends the previous local-in-time theory for strong solutions to a global-in-time one.