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 study the convergence rate of Glimm scheme for general systems of hyperbolic conservation laws without the assumption that each characteristic field is either genuinely nonlinear or linearly degenerate. We first give a sharper estimate of the error arising from the wave tracing argument by a careful analysis of the interaction between small waves. With this key estimate, the convergence rate is shown to be o (1) s 1 3| ln s| 1+ , which is sharper compared to o (1) s 1 4| ln s| given in [T. Yang, Convergence rate of Glimm scheme for general systems of hyperbolic conservation laws, Taiwanese J. Math. 7 (2)(2003) 195205]. However, it is still slower than o (1) s 1 2| ln s| given in [A. Bressan, A. Marson, Error bounds for a deterministic version of the Glimm scheme, Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal. 142 (2)(1998) 155176] for systems with each characteristic field being genuinely nonlinear or linearly degenerate. Here s is the

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

This article is concerned with the time periodic solution to the isentropic compressible Navier-Stokes equations in a periodic domain. Using an approach of parabolic regularization, we first obtain the existence of the time periodic solution to a regularized problem under some smallness and symmetry assumptions on the external force. The result for the original compressible Navier-Stokes equations is then obtained by a limiting process. The uniqueness of the periodic solution is also given.

For the viscous and heat-conductive fluids governed by the compressible NavierStokes equations with an external potential force, there exist non-trivial stationary solutions with zero velocity. By combining the L^p - L^q estimates for the linearized equations and an elaborate energy method, the convergence rates are obtained in various norms for the solution to the stationary profile in the whole space when the initial perturbation of the stationary solution and the potential force are small in some Sobolev norms. More precisely, the optimal convergence rates of the solution and its first order derivatives in L²-norm are obtained when the L¹-norm of the perturbation is bounded.