For the physical vacuum free boundary problem with the sound speed being C 1/2 - H¨older continuous near vacuum boundaries of the compressible Euler equations with damping, the global existence of solutions and convergence to Barenblatt self-similar solutions of the porous media equation was recently proved in [34] for 1-d motions by Luo and the author. This paper generalizes the results for 1-d motions to 3-d spherically symmetric motions. Compared with the 1-d theory, besides the high degeneracy of the equations near the physical vacuum boundary, the analytical difficulties lie in the complexity of equations and the coordinates singularity in the center of symmetry which is resolved by constructing suitable weights. The results obtained in this work contribute to the theory of global solutions to free boundary problems of compressible inviscid fluids in the presence of vacuum states, for which the currently available results are mainly for the local-in-time well-posedness theory, also to the theory of global smooth solutions of dissipative hyperbolic systems which fail to be strictly hyperbolic.

We provide here a framework to analyze the phase transition phenomenon of slice inverse regression (SIR), a supervised dimension reduction technique introduced by Li [1991]. Under mild conditions, the asymptotic ratio ρ = lim p/n is the phase transition parameter and the SIR estimator is consistent if and only if ρ = 0. When dimension p is greater than n, we propose a diagonal thresholding screening SIR (DT-SIR) algorithm. This method provides us with an estimate of the eigen-space of the covariance matrix of the conditional expectation var(E[x|y]). The desired dimension reduction space is then obtained by multiplying the inverse of the covariance matrix on the eigen-space. Under certain sparsity assumptions on both the covariance matrix of predictors and the loadings of the directions, we prove the consistency of DT-SIR in estimating the dimension reduction space in high dimensional data analysis. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate superior performances of the proposed method in comparison to its competitors.

We consider the mixed q-Gaussian algebras introduced by Speicher which are generated by the variables Xi = li + l ∗ i , i = 1, . . . , N, where l ∗ i lj − qij lj l ∗ i = δi,j and −1 < qij = qji < 1. Using the free monotone transport theorem of Guionnet and Shlyakhtenko, we show that the mixed q-Gaussian von Neumann algebras are isomorphic to the free group von Neumann algebra L(FN ), provided that maxi,j |qij | is small enough. Similar results hold in the reduced C ∗ -algebra setting. The proof relies on some estimates which are generalizations of Dabrowski’s results for the special case qij ≡ q.

We consider two-dimensional critical bond percolation. Conditioned on the existence of an open circuit in an annulus, we show that the ratio of the expected size of the shortest open circuit to the expected size of the innermost circuit tends to zero as the side length of the annulus tends to infinity, the aspect ratio remaining fixed. The same proof yields a similar result for the lowest open crossing of a rectangle. In this last case, we answer a question of Kesten and Zhang by showing in addition that the ratio of the length of the shortest crossing to the length of the lowest tends to zero in probability. This suggests that the chemical distance in critical percolation is given by an exponent strictly smaller than that of the lowest path.

A compactness framework is established for approximate solutions to subsonicsonic flows governed by the steady full Euler equations for compressible fluids in arbitrary dimension. The existing compactness frameworks for the two-dimensional irrotational case do not directly apply for the steady full Euler equations in higher dimensions. The new compactness framework we develop applies for both non-homentropic and rotational flows. One of our main observations is that the compactness can be achieved by using only natural weak estimates for the mass balance and the vorticity, along with the Bernoulli law and the entropy relation, through a more delicate analysis on the phase space. As direct applications, we establish two existence theorems for multidimensional subsonic-sonic full Euler flows through infinitely long nozzles.