In this paper, we introduce a new Glimm functional for general systems of hyperbolic conservation laws. This new functional is consistent with the classical Glimm functional for the case when each characteristic field is either genuinely nonlinear or linearly degenerate, so that it can be viewed as optimal in some sense. With this new functional, the consistency of the Glimm scheme is proved clearly for general systems. Moreover, the convergence rate of the Glimm scheme is shown to be the same as the one obtained in Bressan, Marson (Arch Ration Mech Anal 142(2):155176, 1998) for systems with each characteristic field being genuinely nonlinear or linearly degenerate.

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 paper aims to mathematically advance the field of quantitative thermo-acoustic imaging. Given several electromagnetic data sets, we establish for the first time an analytical formula for reconstructing the absorption coefficient from thermal energy measurements. Since the formula involves derivatives of the given data up to the third order, it is unstable in the sense that small measurement noises may cause large errors. However, in the presence of measurement noise, the obtained formula, together with a noise regularization technique, provides a good initial guess for the true absorption coefficient. We finally correct the errors by deriving a reconstruction formula based on the least square solution of an optimal control problem and prove that this optimization step reduces the errors occurring and enhances the resolution.

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.

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.