Stability of the Superposition of a Viscous Contact Wave with Two Rarefaction Waves to the Bipolar Vlasov--Poisson--Boltzmann System

Abstract

We investigate the nonlinear stability of the superposition of a viscous contact wave and two rarefaction waves for a one-dimensional (1D) bipolar Vlasov--Poisson--Boltzmann (VPB) system, which can be used to describe the transportation of charged particles under the additional electrostatic potential force. Based on a new micro-macro type of decomposition around the local Maxwellian related to the bipolar VPB system in the previous work [H.-L. Li, Y. Wang, T. Yang, and M.-Y. Zhong, Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal., 228 (2018), pp. 39--127], we prove that the superposition of a viscous contact wave and two rarefaction waves is time-asymptotically stable to the 1D bipolar VPB system under some smallness conditions on the initial perturbations and wave strength, which implies that this typical superposition wave pattern is nonlinearly stable under the combined effects of the binary collisions, the electrostatic potential force, and the mutual interactions of different charged particles. This is the first result about the nonlinear stability of the combination of two different wave patterns for the VPB system.