Acta Mathematica Scientia ›› 2018, Vol. 38 ›› Issue (5): 1549-1566.

• Articles • Previous Articles     Next Articles

MACROSCOPIC REGULARITY FOR THE BOLTZMANN EQUATION

Feimin HUANG, Yong WANG   

  1. School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China;Academy of Mathematics and System Sciences, CAS, Beijing 100190, China
  • Received:2018-02-01 Online:2018-11-09 Published:2018-11-09
  • Contact: Yong WANG,E-mail:yongwang@amss.ac.cn E-mail:yongwang@amss.ac.cn
  • Supported by:
    Feimin Huang was partially supported by by National Center for Mathematics and Interdisciplinary Sciences, AMSS, CAS and NSFC (11371349 and 11688101). Yong Wang was partially supported by NSFC (11688101, 11771429).

Abstract: The regularity of solutions to the Boltzmann equation is a fundamental problem in the kinetic theory. In this paper, the case with angular cut-off is investigated. It is shown that the macroscopic parts of solutions to the Boltzmann equation, i.e., the density, momentum and total energy are continuous functions of (x,t) in the region R3×(0, +∞). More precisely, these macroscopic quantities immediately become continuous in any positive time even though they are initially discontinuous and the discontinuities of solutions propagate only in the microscopic level. It should be noted that such kind of phenomenon can not happen for the compressible Navier-Stokes equations in which the initial discontinuities of the density never vanish in any finite time, see [22]. This hints that the Boltzmann equation has better regularity effect in the macroscopic level than compressible Navier-Stokes equations.

Key words: Boltzmann equation, macroscopic regularity, compressible Navier-Stokes equations

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