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## Graduate student seminar: Kinetic theory of gases

Lat week, I gave a graduate student seminar, whose purpose is to introduce to first and second year graduate students (at Penn State) an active and beautiful topics of research, and suggest a few possible ideas for students’ presentation later in the semester. Here are slides of my talk, which focuses on Kinetic Theory of Gases, a topics that I will teach as a graduate topics course, next fall (2017).

## The Maxwell-Boltzmann approximation for ion kinetic modeling

In this short paper with C. Bardos, F. Golse, and R. Sentis, we are aimed to justify the Maxwell-Boltzmann approximation from kinetic models, widely used in the literature for electrons density distribution; namely, the relation

$\displaystyle n_e =e^{q_{e} \phi / \theta }$

in which ${n_e, q_e, \theta,\phi}$ denote the electrons density, the elementary charge, the electron temperature, and the electric potential.

## Uniform lower bound for solutions to a quantum Boltzmann

With Minh-Binh Tran, we establish uniform lower bounds, by a Maxwellian, for positive radial solutions to a Quantum Boltzmann kinetic model for bosons; see arXiv preprint.

## Instabilities in the mean field limit

Together with Daniel Han-Kwan, we recently wrote a paper, entitled “Instabilities in the mean field limit”, to be published on the Journal of Statistical Physics (see here for a preprint). I shall explain our main theorem below.

## Math 505, Mathematical Fluid Mechanics: Notes 2

I go on with some basic concepts and classical results in fluid dynamics [numbering is in accordance with the previous notes]. Throughout this section, I consider compressible barotropic ideal fluids with the pressure law ${p = p(\rho)}$ or incompressible ideal fluids with constant density ${\rho = \rho_0}$ (and hence, the pressure is an unknown function in the incompressible case).

## Math 505, Mathematical Fluid Mechanics: Notes 1

This Spring ’16 semester, I am teaching a graduate Math 505 course, whose goal is to introduce the basic concepts and the fundamental mathematical problems in Fluid Mechanics for students both in math and engineering. The difficulty is to assume no background in both fluids and analysis of PDEs from the students. That’s it!

## On the spectral instability of parallel shear flows

This short note is to be published as the proceeding of a Laurent Schwartz PDE seminar talk that I gave last May at IHES, announcing our recent results (on channel flows and boundary layers), which provide a complete mathematical proof of the viscous destabilization phenomenon, pointed out by Heisenberg (1924), C.C. Lin and Tollmien (1940s), among other prominent physicists. Precisely, we construct growing modes of the linearized Navier-Stokes equations about general stationary shear flows in a bounded channel (channel flows) or on a half-space (boundary layers), for sufficiently large Reynolds number $R \to \infty$. Such an instability is linked to the emergence of Tollmien-Schlichting waves in describing the early stage of the transition from laminar to turbulent flows. In fact, the material in this note is only the first half of what I spoke on that day, skipping the steady case!