The nonlinear Schrdinger equation (NLS) has been a fundamental model for understanding vortex motion in superfluids. The vortex motion law has been formally derived on various physical grounds and has been around for almost half a century. We study the nonlinear Schrdinger equation in the incompressible fluid limit on a bounded domain with Dirichlet or Neumann boundary condition. The initial condition contains any finite number of degree 1 vortices. We prove that the NLS linear momentum weakly converges to a solution of the incompressible Euler equation away from the vortices. If the initial NLS energy is almost minimizing, we show that the vortex motion obeys the classical Kirchhoff law for fluid point vortices. Similar results hold for the entire plane and periodic cases, and a related complex GinzburgLandau equation. We treat as well the semi-classical (WKB) limit of NLS in the presence of

This paper is concerned with the Cauchy problem on the VlasovPoissonBoltzmann system for hard potentials in the whole space. When the initial data is a small perturbation of a global Maxwellian, a satisfactory global existence theory of classical solutions to this problem, together with the corresponding temporal decay estimates on the global solutions, is established. Our analysis is based on time-decay properties of solutions and a new timevelocity weight function which is designed to control the large-velocity growth in the nonlinear term for the case of non-hard-sphere interactions.

We study the homogenization of a stationary conductivity problem in a random heterogeneous medium with highly oscillating conductivity coefficients and an ensemble of simply closed conductivity resistant membranes. This medium is randomly deformed and then rescaled from a periodic one with periodic membranes, in a manner similar to the random medium proposed by Blanc, Le Bris, and Lions (2006). Across the membranes, the flux is continuous but the potential field itself undergoes a jump of Robin-type. We prove that, for almost all realizations of the random deformation, as the small scale of variations of the medium goes to zero, the random conductivity problem is well approximated by that of an effective medium which has deterministic and constant coefficients and contains no membrane. The effective coefficients are explicitly represented. One of our main contributions is to provide a solution to the associated auxiliary problem that is posed on the whole space with infinitely many interfaces, a setting that is out of the standard stationary ergodic framework.

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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.