In this paper, we combine the method of constructing the compensating function introduced by Kawashima and the standard energy method for the study on the Landau equation with external forcing. Both the global existence of solutions near the time asymptotic states which are local Maxwellians and the optimal convergence rates are obtained. The method used here has its own advantage for this kind of studies because it does not involve the spectrum analysis of the corresponding linearized operator.

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.

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We study the vanishing viscosity limit of the compressible NavierStokes equations to the Riemann solution of the Euler equations that consists of the superposition of a shock wave and a rarefaction wave. In particular, it is shown that there exists a family of smooth solutions to the compressible NavierStokes equations that converges to the Riemann solution away from the initial and shock layers at a rate in terms of the viscosity and the heat conductivity coefficients. This gives the first mathematical justification of this limit for the NavierStokes equations to the Riemann solution that contains these two typical nonlinear hyperbolic waves.