The purpose of this research monograph is to survey some recent developments in the analysis of shock reflection-diffraction, to present our original mathematical proofs of von Neumann’s conjectures for potential flow, to collect most of the related results and new techniques in the analysis of partial differential equations achieved in the last decades, and to discuss a set of fundamental open problems relevant to the directions of future research in this and related areas.

We study a continuum model for epitaxial growth of thin films in which the slope of mound structure of film surface increases. This model is a diffusion equation for the surface height profile h which is assumed to satisfy the periodic boundary condition. The equation happens to possess a Liapunov or �free-energy� functional. This functional consists of the term |? h|2, which represents the surface diffusion, and - log (1 + |? h|2), which describes the effect of kinetic asymmetry in the adatom attachment-detachment. We first prove for large time t that the interface width---the standard deviation of the height profile---is bounded above by O(t1/2), the averaged gradient is bounded above by O(t1/4), and the averaged energy is bounded below by O(- log t). We then consider a small coefficient e2 of |? h|2 with e = 1/L and L the linear size of the underlying system, and study the energy asymptotics in the large system limit e ? 0. We show that global minimizers of the free-energy functional exist for each e>0, the L2-norm of the gradient of any global minimizer scales as O(1/e), and the global minimum energy scales as O( log e). The existence of global energy minimizers and a scaling argument are used to construct a sequence of equilibrium solutions with different wavelengths. Finally, we apply our minimum energy estimates to derive bounds in terms of the linear system size L for the saturation interface width and the corresponding saturation time.

In this note, we consider regularity theory for a fractional p-Laplace operator which arises in the complex interpolation of the Sobolev spaces, the Hs,p-Laplacian. We obtain the natural analogue to the classical p-Laplacian situation, namely Cs+αloc-regularity for the homogeneous equation.

In this paper, we study the multiplicity of positive solutions for the nonhomogeneous elliptic problem: u+ u= f (x) u p 1+ h (x) in R N. We will show how the shape of the graph of f (x) affects the number of positive solutions.

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.