In this paper, we consider the Cauchy problem to the heat conductive compressible Navier-Stokes equations in the presence of vacuum and with vacuum far field. Global well-posedness of strong solutions is established under the assumption, among some other regularity and compatibility conditions, that the scaling invariant quantity $\|\rho_0\|_\infty(\|\rho_0\|_3+\|\rho_0\|_\infty^2\|\sqrt{\rho_0}u_0\|_2^2)(\|\nabla u_0\|_2^2+ \|\rho_0\|_\infty\|\sqrt{\rho_0}E_0\|_2^2)$ is sufficiently small, with the smallness depending only on the parameters $R, \gamma, \mu, \lambda,$ and $\kappa$ in the system. Notably, the smallness assumption is imposed on the above scaling invariant quantity exclusively, and it is independent of any norms of the initial data, which is different from the existing papers, see, e.g., \cite{HLX12,HUANGLI11,WENZHU17}. The total mass can be either finite or infinite. A new equation for the density, more precisely for the cubic of the density, derived from combing the continuity and momentum equations, is employed to get the $L^\infty_t(L^3)$ type estimate of the density.

We introduce a new geometric flow, called the chord shortening flow, which is the negative gradient flow for the length functional on the space of chords with end points lying on a fixed submanifold in Euclidean space. As an application, we give a simplified proof of a classical theorem of Lusternik and Schnirelmann (and a generalization by Riede and Hayashi) on the existence of multiple orthogonal geodesic chords. For a compact convex planar domain, we show that any convex chord not orthogonal to the boundary would shrink to a point in finite time under the flow.

For a random walk on a finitely generated group G we obtain a generalization of a classical inequality of Ancona. We deduce as a corollary that the identity map on G extends to a continuous equivariant surjection from the Martin boundary to the Floyd boundary, with preimages of conical points being singletons. This provides new results for Martin compactifications of relatively hyperbolic groups.

Given a Riemannian manifold and a closed submanifold, we find a geodesic segment with free boundary on the given submanifold. This is a corollary of the min–max theory which we develop in this article for the free boundary variational problem. In particular, we develop a modified Birkhoff curve shortening process to achieve a strong “Colding–Minicozzi” type min–max approximation result.

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