There are many open problems on the stability of nonlinear wave patterns to the Boltzmann equation even though the corresponding stability theory has been comparatively well-established for the gas dynamical systems. In this paper, we study the nonlinear stability of a rarefaction wave profile to the Boltzmann equation with the boundary effect imposed by specular reflection for both the hard sphere model and the hard potential model with angular cut-off. The analysis is based on the property of the solution and its derivatives which are either odd or even functions at the boundary coming from specular reflection, and the decomposition on both the solution and the Boltzmann equation introduced in [24, 26] for energy method.

In this paper, we are concerned with the one-species VlasovPoissonBoltzmann system with a nonconstant background density in full space. There exists a stationary solution when the background density is a small perturbation of a positive constant state. We prove the nonlinear stability of solutions to the Cauchy problem near the stationary state in some Sobolev space without any time derivatives. This result is nontrivial even when the background density is a constant state. In the proof, the macroscopic balance laws are essentially used to deal with the a priori estimates on both the microscopic and macroscopic parts of the solution. Moreover, some interactive energy functionals are introduced to overcome difficulty stemming from the absence of time derivatives in the energy functional.

The zero dissipation limit of the compressible heat-conducting NavierStokes equations in the presence of the shock is investigated. It is shown that when the heat conduction coefficient and the viscosity coefficient satisfy = O (), = O (), c> 0, as 0 (see (1.3)), if the solution of the corresponding Euler equations is piecewise smooth with shock wave satisfying the Lax entropy condition, then there exists a smooth solution to the NavierStokes equations, which converges to the piecewise smooth shock solution of the Euler equations away from the shock discontinuity at a rate of . The proof is given by a combination of the energy estimates and the matched asymptotic analysis introduced in [3].

In this paper, we give a condition on the bicharacteristic which guarantees the global existence of the mild solution to the Boltzmann equation with an external force for the hard-sphere model and potentials with angular cutoff in infinite vacuum. This generalizes the previous results to the case when the force can have arbitrary strength. The constructive condition on the bicharacteristic is used to obtain the pointwise estimates on the collision operator so that the global existence comes from the contraction mapping theorem.

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