Given a strictly hyperbolic, genuinely nonlinear system of conservation laws, we prove the a priori bound u (t,) u (t,)= O (1)(1+ t) | ln | on the distance between an exact BV solution u and a viscous approximation u, letting the viscosity coefficient 0. In the proof, starting from u we construct an approximation of the viscous solution u by taking a mollification u* and inserting viscous shock profiles at the locations of finitely many large shocks for each fixed . Error estimates are then obtained by introducing new Lyapunov functionals that control interactions of shock waves in the same family and also interactions of waves in different families. 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

We study a Maxwell-Bloch system describing the dynamics of single-longitudinal Raman lasers in the two transverse space dimensions. Raman lasing is generated by a coherent external pump laser, as a three-wave interaction involving two optical and one material wave. On the other hand, a two-level laser involves incoherent external pumping through, for example, an electrical discharge or flashlamp. Raman lasers have the advantage of being tunable and display a novel explicit nonlinear detuning between the pump and laser emission frequencies. Consequently these lasers exhibit much richer nonlinear dynamics. We establish the global existence of classical solutions, and show that for periodic domains the dynamics is governed by a global smooth attractor of finite dimensions. We explain the structures of nonlinear interactions and couplings that lead to the time asymptotic smoothing. We also construct

For systems of hyperbolic conservation laws, a new Glimm functional was recently constructed when the linearly degenerate manifold in each characteristic field is either the whole space or it consists of a finitely many smooth and transversal manifolds of codimension one. This new functional leads to the neat consistency and convergence rate estimation of the Glimm scheme. In this paper, by the motivation of the result in Ref. 2, we show that the corresponding new Glimm functional can be constructed for general systems only under the strict hyperbolicity assumption.

The Boltzmann H-theorem implies that the solution to the Boltzmann equation tends to an equilibrium, that is, a Maxwellian when time tends to infinity. This has been proved in varies settings when the initial energy is finite. However, when the initial energy is infinite, the time asymptotic state is no longer described by a Maxwellian, but a self-similar solution obtained by Bobylev-Cercignani. The purpose of this paper is to rigorously justify this for the spatially homogeneous problem with Maxwellian molecule type cross section without angular cutoff.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new characterization of the characteristic functions for the study on the measure valued solution to the homogeneous Boltzmann equation so that it precisely captures the moment constraint in physics. This significantly improves the previous result by Cannone and Karch (2010) [2] in the sense that the new characterization gives a complete description of infinite energy solutions for the Maxwellian cross section. In addition, the global in time smoothing effect of the infinite energy solution is justified as for the finite energy solution except for a single Dirac mass initial datum.