We study the critical dissipative quasi-geostrophic equations in $\bR^ 2$ with arbitrary H^ 1 initial data. After showing certain decay estimate, a global well-posedness result is proved by adapting the method in [11] with a suitable modification. A decay in time estimate for higher order homogeneous Sobolev norms of solutions is also discussed.

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 development of shocks in nonlinear hyperbolic conservation laws may be regularized through either diffusion or relaxation. However, we have observed surprisingly that for some physical problems, when both of the smoothing factors - diffusion and relaxation - coexist, under appropriate asymptotic assumptions, the dispersive waves are enhanced. This phenomenon is studied asymptotically in the sense of the Chapman-Enskog expansion and demonstrated numerically.

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.

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