In the presence of vacuum, the physical entropy for polytropic gases behaves singularly and it is thus a challenge to study its dynamics. It is shown in this paper that the boundedness of the entropy can be propagated up to any finite time provided that the initial vacuum presents only at far fields with sufficiently slow decay of the initial density. More precisely, for the Cauchy problem of the onedimensional heat conductive compressible Navier--Stokes equations, the global well-posedness of strong solutions and uniform boundedness of the corresponding entropy are established, as long as the initial density vanishes only at far fields with a rate no more than $O(\frac{1}{x^2})$. The main tools of proving the uniform boundedness of the entropy are some singularly weighted energy estimates carefully designed for the heat conductive compressible Navier--Stokes equations and an elaborate De Giorgi type iteration technique for some classes of degenerate parabolic equations. The De Giorgi type iterations are carried out to different equations in establishing the lower and upper bounds of the entropy.

It is well-known that sparse grid algorithm has been widely accepted as an efficient tool to overcome the “curse of dimensionality" in some degree. In this note, we give the error estimate of hyperbolic cross (HC) approximations with all sorts of Askey polynomials. These polynomials are useful in generalized polynomial chaos (gPC) in the field of uncertainty quantification. The exponential convergences in both regular and optimized HC approximations have been shown under the condition that the random variable depends on the random inputs smoothly in some degree. Moreover, we apply gPC to numerically solve the ordinary differential equations with slightly higher dimensional random inputs. Both regular and optimized HC have been investigated with Laguerre-chaos, Charlier-chaos and Hermite-chaos in the numerical experiment. The discussion of the connection between the standard ANOVA approximation and Galerkin approximation is in the appendix.

The aim of this paper is to develop a mathematical framework for opto-elastography. In opto-elastography, a mechanical perturbation of the medium produces a decorrelation of optical speckle patterns due to the displacements of optical scatterers. To model this, we consider two optically random media, with the second medium obtained by shifting the first medium in some local region. We derive the radiative transfer equation for the cross-correlation of the wave fields in the media. Then we derive its diffusion approximation. In both the radiative transfer and the diffusion regimes, we relate the correlation of speckle patterns to the solutions of the radiative transfer and the diffusion equations. We present numerical simulations based on our model which are in agreement with recent experimental measurements.

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