There have been extensive studies on the large time behavior of solutions to systems on gas motions, such as the Navier-Stokes equations and the Boltzmann equation. Recently, an approach is introduced by combining the energy method and the spectral analysis to the study of the optimal rates of convergence to the asymptotic profiles. In this paper, we will first illustrate this method by using some simple model and then we will present some recent results on the Navier-Stokes equations and the Boltzmann equation. Precisely, we prove the stability of the non-trivial steady state for the Navier-Stokes equations with potential forces and also obtain the optimal rate of convergence of solutions toward the steady state. The same issue was also studied for the Boltzmann equation in the presence of the general time-space dependent forces. It is expected that this approach can also be applied to other dissipative

A uniform approach is introduced to study the existence of measure valued solutions to the homogeneous Boltzmann equation for both hard potential with finite energy, and soft potential with finite or infinite energy, by using Toscani metric. Under the non-angular cutoff assumption on the cross-section, the solutions obtained are shown to be in the Schwartz space in the velocity variable as long as the initial data is not a single Dirac mass without any extra moment condition for hard potential, and with the boundedness on moments of any order for soft potential.

For the class of graph-directed self-similar measures on R, which could have overlaps but are essentially of finite type, we set up a framework for deriving a closed formula for the spectral dimension of the Laplacians defined by these measures. For the class of finitely ramified graph-directed self-similar sets, the spectral dimension of the associated Laplace operators has been obtained by Hambly and Nyberg [6]. The main novelty of our results is that the graph-directed self-similar measures we consider do not need to satisfy the graph open set condition.

We investigate, by numerical simulation, the shear layer instability associated with the outer layer of a spiral vortex formed behind an impulsively started thin ellipse. The unstable free shear layer undergoes a secondary instability. We connect this instability with the dynamics of corner vortices adjacent to the tip of the ellipse by observing that the typical turnover time of the corner vortex matches the period of the unstable mode in the shear layer. We suggest that the corner vortex acts as a signal generator, and produces periodic perturbation which triggers the instability.

In this paper, we study the existence of stationary solutions to the VlasovPoissonBoltzmann system when the background density function tends to a positive constant with a very mild decay rate as| x|. In fact, the stationary VlasovPoissonBoltzmann system can be written into an elliptic equation with exponential nonlinearity. Under the assumption on the decay rate being (ln (e+| x|)) for some > 0, it is shown that this elliptic equation has a unique solution. This result generalizes the previous work [R. Glassey, J. Schaeffer, Y. Zheng, Steady states of the VlasovPoissonFokkerPlanck system, J. Math. Anal. Appl. 202 (1996) 10581075] where the decay rate (1+| x|) 1 2 is assumed.