For the Boltzmann equation with an external potential force depending only on the space variables, there is a family of stationary solutions, which are local Maxwellians with space dependent density, zero velocity and constant temperature. In this paper, we will study the nonlinear stability of these stationary solutions by using the energy method. The analysis combines the analytic techniques used for the conservation laws using the fluid-type system derived from the Boltzmann equation (cf. [14]) and the dissipative effects on the fluid and non-fluid components of the Boltzmann equation through the celebrated H-theorem. To our knowledge, this is the first result on the global classical solutions to the Boltzmann equation with external force and non-trivial large time behavior in the whole space.

We consider the optimization approach to the acousto-electric imaging problem. Assuming that the electric conductivity distribution is a small perturbation of a constant, we investigate the least-squares estimate analytically using (multiple) Fourier series, and confirm the widely observed fact that acousto-electric imaging has high resolution and is statistically stable. We also analyze the case of partial data and the case of limited-view data, in which some singularities of the conductivity can still be imaged.

The solvability in Sobolev spaces is proved for divergence form complex-valued higher order parabolic systems in the whole space, on a half-space, and on a Reifenberg flat domain. The leading coefficients are assumed to be merely measurable in one spacial direction and have small mean oscillations in the orthogonal directions on each small cylinder. The directions in which the coefficients are only measurable vary depending on each cylinder. The corresponding elliptic problem is also considered.

Although the decay in time estimates of the semi-group generated by the linearized Boltzmann operator without forcing have been well established, there is no corresponding result for the case with general external force. This paper is mainly concerned with the optimal decay estimates on the solution operator in some weighted Sobolev spaces for the linearized Boltzmann equation with a time dependent external force. No time decay assumption is made on the force. The proof is based on both the energy method through the macro-micro decomposition and the L p-L q estimates from the spectral analysis. The decay estimates thus obtained are applied to the study on the global existence of the Cauchy problem to the nonlinear Boltzmann equation with time dependent external force and source. Precisely, for space dimension n>= 3, the global existence and decay rates of solutions to the Cauchy problem are

This is a continuation of the paper [15] on nonlinear boundary layers of the Boltzmann equation where the existence is established and shown to be strongly dependent on the Mach number <i>M</i> ^<i></i> of the Maxwellian state at far field. In this paper, when <i>M</i> ^<i></i>&lt;1, we will show that the linearized operator has the exponential decay in time property and therefore a bootstrapping argument yields nonlinear stability of the boundary layers.