This paper concerns the physical behaviors of any solutions to the one dimensional compressible Navier-Stokes equations for viscous and heat conductive gases with constant viscosities and heat conductivity for fast decaying density at far fields only. First, it is shown that the specific entropy becomes not uniformly bounded immediately after the initial time, as long as the initial density decays to vacuum at the far field at the rate not slower than $O\left(\frac1{|x|^{\ell_\rho}}\right)$ with $\ell_\rho>2$. Furthermore, for faster decaying initial density, i.e., $\ell_\rho\geq4$, a sharper result is discovered that the absolute temperature becomes uniformly positive at each positive time, no matter whether it is uniformly positive or not initially, and consequently the corresponding entropy behaves as $O(-\log(\varrho_0(x)))$ at each positive time, independent of the boundedness of the initial entropy. Such phenomena are in sharp contrast to the case with slowly decaying initial density of the rate no faster than $O(\frac1{x^2})$, for which our previous works \cite{LIXINADV,LIXINCPAM,LIXIN3DK} show that the uniform boundedness of the entropy can be propagated for all positive time and thus the temperature decays to zero at the far field. These give a complete answer to the problem concerning the propagation of uniform boundedness of the entropy for the heat conductive ideal gases and, in particular, show that the algebraic decay rate $2$ of the initial density at the far field is sharp for the uniform boundedness of the entropy. The tools to prove our main results are based on some scaling transforms, including the Kelvin transform, and a Hopf type lemma for a class of degenerate equations with possible unbounded coefficients.

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For autonomous Tonelli systems on $\R^n$, we develop an intrinsic proof of the existence of generalized characteristics using sup-convolutions. This approach, together with convexity estimates for the fundamental solution, leads to new results such as the global propagation of singularities along generalized characteristics.

For periodic initial data with density allowed to vanish initially, we establish the global existence of strong and weak solutions to the two-dimensional barotropic compressible Navier–Stokes equations with no restrictions on the size of initial data provided the shear viscosity is a positive constant and the bulk one is λ =ρ^β with β>4/3. These results generalize and improve the previous ones due to Vaigant–Kazhikhov [Sib. Math. J. 36 (1995) 1283–1316] who required β>3. Moreover, we also prove that the densities for both the strong and weak solutions remain bounded from above independently of time. As a consequence, it is shown that both the strong and weak solutions converge to the equilibrium state as time tends to infinity.

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