The uniqueness of positive solutions to some semilinear elliptic systems with variational structure arising from mathematical physics is proved. The key ingredient of the proof is the oscillatory behavior of solutions to linearized equations for cooperative semilinear elliptic systems of two equations on one-dimensional domains, and it is shown that the stability of the positive solutions for such semilinear system is closely related to the oscillatory behavior.

We study the vanishing viscosity of the Navier-Stokes equations for interacting shocks. Given an entropy solution to <i>p</i>-system which consists of two different families of shocks interacting at some positive time, we show that such entropy solution is the vanishing viscosity limit of a family of global smooth solutions to the isentropic Navier-Stokes equations. The key point of the proofs is to derive the estimates separately before and after the interaction time and connect the incoming and outgoing viscous shock profiles.

For strong solutions of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in bounded domains with velocity specified at the boundary, we establish the unconditional stability and convergence of discretization schemes that decouple the updates of pressure and velocity through explicit time stepping for pressure. These schemes require no solution of stationary Stokes systems, nor any compatibility between velocity and pressure spaces to ensure an inf-sup condition, and are representative of a class of highly efficient computational methods that have recently emerged. The proofs are simple, based upon a new, sharp estimate for the commutator of the Laplacian and Helmholtz projection operators. This allows us to treat an unconstrained formulation of the Navier-Stokes equations as a perturbed diffusion equation. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

We study the variation of the convergence Newton polygon of a differential equation along a smooth Berkovich curve over a non-archimedean complete valued field of characteristic zero. Relying on work of the second author who investigated its properties on affinoid domains of the affine line, we prove that its slopes give rise to continuous functions that factorise by the retraction through a locally finite subgraph of the curve.

We study linear and nonlinear Schrodinger equations defined by fractal measures. Under the assumption that the Laplacian has compact resolvent, we prove that there exists a uniqueness weak solution for a linear Schrodinger equation, and then use it to obtain the existence and uniqueness of weak solution of a nonlinear Schrodinger equation. We prove that for a class of self-similar measures on R with overlaps, the Schrodinger equations can be discretized so that the finite element method can be applied to obtain approximate solutions. We also prove that the numerical solutions converge to the actual solution and obtain the rate of convergence.