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ABSTRACT We investigate a kinetic model for the sedimentation of dilute suspensions of rod-like particles under gravity, deduced by Helzel, Otto, and Tzavaras (2011), which couples the impressible (Navier-)Stokes equation with the Fokker-Planck equation. With a no-flux boundary condition for the distribution function, we establish the existence and uniqueness of a global weak solution to the two dimensional model involving the Stokes equation.

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.

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 the paper, we study the three-dimensional Prandtl equations, and prove that if one component of the tangential velocity field satisfies the monotonicity assumption in the normal direction, then the system is locally well-posed in the Gevrey function space with Gevrey index in ] 1, 2]. The proof relies on some new cancellation mechanism in the system in addition to those observed in the two-dimensional setting.