In this paper we study the asymptotic nonlinear stability of discrete shocks for the Lax-Friedrichs scheme for approximating general m×m systems of nonlinear hyperbolic conservation laws. It is shown that weak single discrete shocks for such a scheme are nonlinearly stable in the Lp-norm for all p ≧ 1, provided that the sums of the initial perturbations equal zero. These results should shed light on the convergence of the numerical solution constructed by the Lax-Friedrichs scheme for the single-shock solution of system of hyperbolic conservation laws. If the Riemann solution corresponding to the given far-field states is a superposition of m single shocks from each characteristic family, we show that the corresponding multiple discrete shocks are nonlinearly stable in Lp (P ≧ 2). These results are proved by using both a weighted estimate and a characteristic energy method based on the internal structures of the discrete shocks and the essential monotonicity of the Lax-Friedrichs scheme.

A key difficulty in the analysis and numerical approximation of the shallow water equations is the nonconservative product of measures due to the gravitational force acting on a sloped bottom. Solutions may be nonunique, and numerical schemes are not only consistent discretizations of the shallow water equations, but they also determine how to model the physics. Our derivation is based on a subcell reconstruction using infinitesimal singular layers at the cell boundaries, as inspired by S. Noelle, Y. Xing, and C.-W. Shu [J. Comput. Phys., 226 (2007), pp. 29-58]. One key step is to separate the singular measures. Another aspect is the reconstruction of the solution variables in the singular layers. We study three reconstructions. The first leads to the well-known scheme of Audusse et al., [SIAM J. Sci. Comput., 25 (2004), pp. 2050-2065], which introduces the hydrostatic reconstruction. The second is a modification proposed in [T. Morales de Luna, M. J. Castro D´ıaz, and C. Par´es, Appl. Math. Comput., 219 (2013), pp. 9012-9032], which analyzes whether a wave has enough energy to overcome a step. The third is our new scheme, which borrows its structure from the wet-dry front. For a number of cases discussed in recent years, where water runs down a hill, Audusse’s scheme converges slowly or fails. Morales’ scheme gives a visible improvement. Both schemes are clearly outperformed by our new scheme.

As a tool for solving the Neumann problem for divergence-form equations, Kenig and Pipher introduced the space ${\mathcal{X}}$ of functions on the half-space, such that the non-tangential maximal function of their$L$_{2}Whitney averages belongs to$L$_{2}on the boundary. In this paper, answering questions which arose from recent studies of boundary value problems by Auscher and the second author, we find the pre-dual of ${\mathcal{X}}$ , and characterize the pointwise multipliers from ${\mathcal{X}}$ to$L$_{2}on the half-space as the well-known Carleson-type space of functions introduced by Dahlberg. We also extend these results to$L$_{$p$}generalizations of the space ${\mathcal{X}}$ . Our results elaborate on the well-known duality between Carleson measures and non-tangential maximal functions.

In this paper, we study the existence of stationary solutions to the VlasovPoissonBoltzmann system when the background density function tends to a positive constant with a very mild decay rate as| x|. In fact, the stationary VlasovPoissonBoltzmann system can be written into an elliptic equation with exponential nonlinearity. Under the assumption on the decay rate being (ln (e+| x|)) for some > 0, it is shown that this elliptic equation has a unique solution. This result generalizes the previous work [R. Glassey, J. Schaeffer, Y. Zheng, Steady states of the VlasovPoissonFokkerPlanck system, J. Math. Anal. Appl. 202 (1996) 10581075] where the decay rate (1+| x|) 1 2 is assumed.

For the Boltzmann equation with an external force in the form of the gradient of a potential function in space variable, the stability of its stationary solutions as local Maxwellians was studied by S. Ukai et al. (2005) through the energy method. Based on this stability analysis and some techniques on analyzing the convergence rates to station- ary solutions for the compressible Navier-Stokes equations, in this paper, we study the convergence rate to the above stationary solutions for the Boltzmann equation which is a fundamental equation in statistical physics for non-equilibrium rarefied gas. By combining the dissipation from the viscosity and heat conductivity on the fluid components and the dissipation on the non-fluid component through the celebrated H-theorem, a convergence rate of the same order as the one for the compressible Navier-Stokes is obtained by constructing some