In this paper, we study the asymptotic stability of rarefaction waves for the compressible isentropic NavierStokes equations with density-dependent viscosity. First, a weak solution around a rarefaction wave to the Cauchy problem is constructed by approximating the system and regularizing the initial values which may contain vacuum states. Then some global in time estimates on the weak solution are obtained. Based on these uniform estimates, the vacuum states are shown to vanish in finite time and the weak solution we constructed becomes a unique strong one. Consequently, the stability of the rarefaction wave is proved in a weak sense. The theory holds for large-amplitudes rarefaction waves and arbitrary initial perturbations.

In this paper we prove an existence theorem of global smooth solutions for the Cauchy problem of a class of quasilinear hyperbolic systems with nonlinear dissipative terms under the assumption that only the <i>C</i>⁰-norm of the initial data is sufficiently small, while the <i>C</i>¹-norm of the initial data can be large. The analysis is based on <i>a priori</i> estimates, which are obtained by a generalised Lax transformation.

In this paper, self-similarity is illustrated and compared in deterministic and stochastic dissipative systems. Examples are (1) deterministic self-similarity in reaction-diffusion system and Navier-Stokes equations, where solutions eventually decay to zero due to balance of diffusion (viscosity) and nonlinearity;(2) statistical self-similarity in randomly advected passive scalar model of Kraichnan where solutions undergo turbulent decay due to roughness of advection;(3) selfsimilarity in blowup of solutions of fourth order nonlinear parabolic equations of the Cahn-Hillard type. Problems for future research are mentioned, especially those where self-similarity is conjectured based on numerical evidence or physical grounds but mathematically open.

This work is concerned with our recently developed formalism of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. This formalism extends the classical irreversible thermodynamics which leads to classical thermodynamics and can not describe physical phenomena with long relaxations. With the extended theory, we obtain a generalized hydrodynamic system which can be used to describe the non-Newtonian fluids, heat transfer beyond Fourier's law and fluid flow in very short temporal and spatial scales. We study the mathematical structure of the generalized hydrodynamic system and show that it possesses a nice conservation-dissipation structure and therefore is symmetrizable hyperbolic. Moreover, we rigorously justify that this generalized hydrodynamic system tends to the classical hydrodynamics when the relaxation times approach to zero. This shows that the classical hydrodynamics can be derived as an approximation of our generalized one.

We give a generalized version of uncertainty principle, and apply it to the study of regularization properties of solutions to kinetic equations. In particular, both linearized and nonlinear space inhomogeneous Boltzmann equations without Grad's cutoff assumption are considered. <b><i>To cite this article: R. Alexandre et al., C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris, Ser. I 345 (2007).</i></b>