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This is a continuation of our series of works for the inhomogeneous Boltzmann equation. We study qualitative properties of classical solutions; the full regularization in all variables, uniqueness, non-negativity and convergence rate to the equilibrium, to be precise. Together with the results of Parts I and II about the well-posedness of the Cauchy problem around the Maxwellian, we conclude this series with a satisfactory mathematical theory for the Boltzmann equation without angular cutoff.

The spatially homogeneous Boltzmann equation without angular cutoff is discussed on the regularity of solutions for the modified hard potential and Debye-Yukawa potential. When the angular singularity of the cross section is moderate, any weak solution having the finite mass, energy and entropy lies in the Sobolev space of infinite order for any positive time, while for the general potentials, it lies in the Schwartz space if it has moments of arbitrary order. The main ingredients of the proof are the suitable choice of the mollifiers composed of pseudo-differential operators and the sharp estimates of the commutators of the Boltzmann collision operator and pseudo-differential operators. The method developed here also provides some new estimates on the collision operator.

Although the decay in time estimates of the semi-group generated by the linearized Boltzmann operator without forcing have been well established, there is no corresponding result for the case with general external force. This paper is mainly concerned with the optimal decay estimates on the solution operator in some weighted Sobolev spaces for the linearized Boltzmann equation with a time dependent external force. No time decay assumption is made on the force. The proof is based on both the energy method through the macro-micro decomposition and the <i>L</i> ^<i>p</i>-<i>L</i> ^<i>q</i> estimates from the spectral analysis. The decay estimates thus obtained are applied to the study on the global existence of the Cauchy problem to the nonlinear Boltzmann equation with time dependent external force and source. Precisely, for space dimension <i>n</i>3, the

The time evolution of the distribution function for the charged particles in a dilute gas is governed by the VlasovPoissonBoltzmann system when the force is self-induced and its potential function satisfies the Poisson equation. In this paper, we give a satisfactory global existence theory of classical solutions to this system when the initial data is a small perturbation of a global Maxwellian. Moreover, the convergence rate in time to the global Maxwellian is also obtained through the energy method. The proof is based on the theory of compressible NavierStokes equations with forcing and the decomposition of the solutions to the Boltzmann equation with respect to the local Maxwellian introduced in [23] and elaborated in [31].

METHODS AND APPLICATIONS OF ANALYSIS. 2000 International Press Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 495-510, September 2000 007

The dynamics of dilute electrons can be modelled by the fundamental VlasovPoissonBoltzmann system which describes mutual interactions of the electrons through collisions in the self-consistent electric field. In this paper, it is shown that any smooth perturbation of a given global Maxwellian leads to a unique global-in-time classical solution when either the mean free path is small or the background charge density is large. Moreover, the solution converges to the global Maxwellian when time tends to infinity. The analysis combines the techniques used in the study of conservation laws with the decomposition of the Boltzmann equation introduced in [17, 19] by obtaining new entropy estimates for this physical model.

It is well known that the Boltzmann equation is related to the Euler and Navier-Stokes equations in the field of gas dynamics. The relation is either for small Knudsen number, or, for dissipative waves in the time-asymptotic sense. In this paper, we show that rarefaction waves for the Boltzmann equation are time-asymptotic stable and tend to the rarefaction waves for the Euler and Navier-Stokes equations. Our main tool is the combination of techniques for viscous conservation laws and the energy method based on micro-macro decomposition of the Boltzmann equation. The expansion nature of the rarefaction waves and the suitable microscopic version of the <i>H</i>-theorem are essential elements of our analysis.

For the Boltzmann equation with an external potential force depending only on the space variables, there is a family of stationary solutions, which are local Maxwellians with space dependent density, zero velocity and constant temperature. In this paper, we will study the nonlinear stability of these stationary solutions by using the energy method. The analysis combines the analytic techniques used for the conservation laws using the fluid-type system derived from the Boltzmann equation (cf. [14]) and the dissipative effects on the fluid and non-fluid components of the Boltzmann equation through the celebrated H-theorem. To our knowledge, this is the first result on the global classical solutions to the Boltzmann equation with external force and non-trivial large time behavior in the whole space.

As a continuation of our series works on the Boltzmann equation without angular cutoff assumption, in this part, the global existence of solution to the Cauchy problem in the whole space is proved in some suitable weighted Sobolev spaces for hard potential when the solution is a small perturbation of a global equilibrium.

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.