Young Measures Generated by Ideal Incompressible Fluid Flows

In their seminal paper "Oscillations and concentrations in weak solutions of the incompressible fluid equations", R. DiPerna and A. Majda introduced the notion of measure-valued solution for the incompressible Euler equations in order to capture complex phenomena present in limits of approximate solutions, such as persistence of oscillation and development of concentrations. Furthermore, they gave several explicit examples exhibiting such phenomena. In this paper we show that any measure-valued solution can be generated by a sequence of exact weak solutions. In particular this gives rise to a very large, arguably too large, set of weak solutions of the incompressible Euler equations.Comment: 35 pages. Final revised version. To appear in Arch. Ration. Mech. Ana

On the stability of travelling waves with vorticity obtained by minimisation

We modify the approach of Burton and Toland [Comm. Pure Appl. Math. (2011)] to show the existence of periodic surface water waves with vorticity in order that it becomes suited to a stability analysis. This is achieved by enlarging the function space to a class of stream functions that do not correspond necessarily to travelling profiles. In particular, for smooth profiles and smooth stream functions, the normal component of the velocity field at the free boundary is not required a priori to vanish in some Galilean coordinate system. Travelling periodic waves are obtained by a direct minimisation of a functional that corresponds to the total energy and that is therefore preserved by the time-dependent evolutionary problem (this minimisation appears in Burton and Toland after a first maximisation). In addition, we not only use the circulation along the upper boundary as a constraint, but also the total horizontal impulse (the velocity becoming a Lagrange multiplier). This allows us to preclude parallel flows by choosing appropriately the values of these two constraints and the sign of the vorticity. By stability, we mean conditional energetic stability of the set of minimizers as a whole, the perturbations being spatially periodic of given period.Comment: NoDEA Nonlinear Differential Equations and Applications, to appea

Steady nearly incompressible vector fields in 2D: chain rule and renormalization

Given bounded vector field $bcolon RR^d o RR^d$, scalar field $ucolon RR^d o RR$ and a smooth function $eta colon RR o RR$ we study the characterization of the distribution $div(eta(u)b)$ in terms of $div b$ and $div(u b)$. In the case of $BV$ vector fields $b$ (and under some further assumptions) such characterization was obtained by L. Ambrosio, C. De Lellis and J. Mal'y, up to an error term which is a measure concentrated on so-called emph{tangential set} of $b$. We answer some questions posed in their paper concerning the properties of this term. In particular we construct a nearly incompressible $BV$ vector field $b$ and a bounded function $u$ for which this term is nonzero. For steady nearly incompressible vector fields $b$ (and under some further assumptions) in case when $d=2$ we provide complete characterization of $div(eta(u) b)$ in terms of $div b$ and $div(u b)$. Our approach relies on the structure of level sets of Lipschitz functions on $RR^2$ obtained by G. Alberti, S. Bianchini and G. Crippa. Extending our technique we obtain new sufficient conditions when any bounded weak solution $u$ of $d_t u + b cdot abla u=0$ is emph{renormalized}, i.e. also solves $d_t eta(u) + b cdot abla eta(u)=0$ for any smooth function $eta colonRR o RR$. As a consequence we obtain new uniqueness result for this equation

Asymptotic Stability of the Relativistic Boltzmann Equation for the Soft Potentials

In this paper it is shown that unique solutions to the relativistic Boltzmann equation exist for all time and decay with any polynomial rate towards their steady state relativistic Maxwellian provided that the initial data starts out sufficiently close in $L^\infty_\ell$. If the initial data are continuous then so is the corresponding solution. We work in the case of a spatially periodic box. Conditions on the collision kernel are generic in the sense of (Dudy{\'n}ski and Ekiel-Je{\.z}ewska, Comm. Math. Phys., 1988); this resolves the open question of global existence for the soft potentials.Comment: 64 page

Isometric Immersions and Compensated Compactness

A fundamental problem in differential geometry is to characterize intrinsic metrics on a two-dimensional Riemannian manifold ${\mathcal M}^2$ which can be realized as isometric immersions into $\R^3$. This problem can be formulated as initial and/or boundary value problems for a system of nonlinear partial differential equations of mixed elliptic-hyperbolic type whose mathematical theory is largely incomplete. In this paper, we develop a general approach, which combines a fluid dynamic formulation of balance laws for the Gauss-Codazzi system with a compensated compactness framework, to deal with the initial and/or boundary value problems for isometric immersions in $\R^3$. The compensated compactness framework formed here is a natural formulation to ensure the weak continuity of the Gauss-Codazzi system for approximate solutions, which yields the isometric realization of two-dimensional surfaces in $\R^3$. As a first application of this approach, we study the isometric immersion problem for two-dimensional Riemannian manifolds with strictly negative Gauss curvature. We prove that there exists a $C^{1,1}$ isometric immersion of the two-dimensional manifold in $\R^3$ satisfying our prescribed initial conditions. TComment: 25 pages, 6 figue

Regularizing effect and local existence for non-cutoff Boltzmann equation

The Boltzmann equation without Grad's angular cutoff assumption is believed to have regularizing effect on the solution because of the non-integrable angular singularity of the cross-section. However, even though so far this has been justified satisfactorily for the spatially homogeneous Boltzmann equation, it is still basically unsolved for the spatially inhomogeneous Boltzmann equation. In this paper, by sharpening the coercivity and upper bound estimates for the collision operator, establishing the hypo-ellipticity of the Boltzmann operator based on a generalized version of the uncertainty principle, and analyzing the commutators between the collision operator and some weighted pseudo differential operators, we prove the regularizing effect in all (time, space and velocity) variables on solutions when some mild regularity is imposed on these solutions. For completeness, we also show that when the initial data has this mild regularity and Maxwellian type decay in velocity variable, there exists a unique local solution with the same regularity, so that this solution enjoys the $C^\infty$ regularity for positive time

The Orbital Stability of the Ground States and the Singularity Formation for the Gravitational Vlasov Poisson System

International audienceWe study the gravitational Vlasov Poisson system $f_t+v\cdot\nabla_x f-E\cdot\nabla_vf=0$ where $E(x)=\nabla_x \phi(x)$, $\Delta_x\phi=\rho(x)$, \rho(x)=\int_{\RR^N} f(x,v)dxdv, in dimension $N=3,4$. In dimension $N=3$ where the problem is subcritical, we prove using concentration compactness techniques that every minimizing sequence to a large class of minimization problems attained on steady states solutions are up to a translation shift relatively compact in the energy space. This implies in particular the orbital stability {\it in the energy space} of the spherically symmetric polytropes what improves the nonlinear stability results obtained for this class in \cite{Guo,GuoRein,Dol}. In dimension $N=4$ where the problem is $L^1$ critical, we obtain the polytropic steady states as best constant minimizers of a suitable Sobolev type inequality relating the kinetic and the potential energy. We then derive using an explicit pseudo-conformal symmetry the existence of critical mass finite time blow up solutions, and prove more generally a mass concentration phenomenon for finite time blow up solutions. This is the first result of description of a singularity formation in a Vlasov setting. The global structure of the problem is reminiscent to the one for the focusing non linear Schrödinger equation $iu_t=-\Delta u-|u|^{p-1}u$ in the energy space $H^1(\R^N)$

On Strong Convergence to Equilibrium for the Boltzmann Equation with Soft Potentials

The paper concerns $L^1$- convergence to equilibrium for weak solutions of the spatially homogeneous Boltzmann Equation for soft potentials (-4\le \gm<0), with and without angular cutoff. We prove the time-averaged $L^1$-convergence to equilibrium for all weak solutions whose initial data have finite entropy and finite moments up to order greater than 2+|\gm|. For the usual $L^1$-convergence we prove that the convergence rate can be controlled from below by the initial energy tails, and hence, for initial data with long energy tails, the convergence can be arbitrarily slow. We also show that under the integrable angular cutoff on the collision kernel with -1\le \gm<0, there are algebraic upper and lower bounds on the rate of $L^1$-convergence to equilibrium. Our methods of proof are based on entropy inequalities and moment estimates.Comment: This version contains a strengthened theorem 3, on rate of convergence, considerably relaxing the hypotheses on the initial data, and introducing a new method for avoiding use of poitwise lower bounds in applications of entropy production to convergence problem