Nonlinear stability of boundary layers for the Boltzmann equation with cutoff soft potentials

The study on the boundary layer is important in both mathematics and physics. This paper considers the nonlinear stability of boundary layer solutions for the Boltzmann equation with cutoff soft potentials when the Mach number of the far field is less than -1. Unlike the collision frequency is strictly positive in the hard potential or hard sphere model, the collision frequency has no positive lower bound for the cutoff soft potentials, so the decay in time cannot be expected. Instead, the present paper proves that the solution will always be in a small region around the boundary layer by noticing the decay property of collision operator in velocity. (c) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.