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.

An elliptic equation arising from the study o fstatic solutions with prescribed zeros and poles of the Einstein equations coupled with the classical sigma model and an Abelian gauge field, is considered. We classify the solutions and establish the uniqueness of radially symmetric solutions. We also complete a classification of symmetric solutions of an elliptic equation on the sphere.

We consider the problem of the random fluctuations in the solutions to elliptic PDEs with highly oscillatory random coefficients. In our setting, as the correlation length of the fluctuations tends to zero, the heterogeneous solution converges to a deterministic solution obtained by averaging. When the Green’s function to the unperturbed operator is sufficiently singular (i.e., not square integrable locally), the leading corrector to the averaged solution may be either deterministic or random, or both in a sense we shall explain. Our main application is the solution of an elliptic problem with random Robin boundary condition that may be used to model diffusion of signaling molecules through a layer of cells into a bulk of extracellular medium. The problem is then described by an elliptic pseudo-differential operator (a Dirichlet-to-Neumann operator) on the boundary of the domain with random potential. In the physical setting of a three dimensional extracellular medium on top of a two-dimensional surface of cells forming a layer of epithelium, we show that the approximate corrector to averaging consists of a deterministic correction plus a Gaussian field of amplitude proportional to the correlation length of the random medium. The result is obtained under some assumptions on the four-point correlation function in the medium. We provide examples of such random media based on Gaussian and Poisson statistics.

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In this paper we study the Euler-Poincar\'{e} equations in $\Bbb R^N$. We prove local existence of weak solutions in $W^{2,p}(\Bbb R^N),$ $p>N$, and local existence of unique classical solutions in $H^k (\Bbb R^N)$, $k>N/2+3$, as well as a blow-up criterion. For the zero dispersion equation($\alpha=0$) we prove a finite time blow-up of the classical solution. We also prove that as the dispersion parameter vanishes, the weak solution converges to a solution of the zero dispersion equation with sharp rate as $\alpha\to0$, provided that the limiting solution belongs to $C([0, T);H^k(\Bbb R^N))$ with $k>N/2 +3$. For the {\em stationary weak solutions} of the Euler-Poincar\'{e} equations we prove a Liouville type theorem. Namely, for $\alpha>0$ any weak solution $\mathbf{u}\in H^1(\Bbb R^N)$ is $\mathbf{u}=0$; for $\alpha=0$ any weak solution $\mathbf{u}\in L^2(\Bbb R^N)$ is $\mathbf{u}=0$.