GLOBAL WEAK SOLUTIONS OF AN INITIAL BOUNDARY VALUE PROBLEM FOR SCREW PINCHES IN PLASMA PHYSICS

This paper is concerned with an initial-boundary value problem for screw pinches arisen from plasma physics. We prove the global existence of weak solutions to this physically very important problem. The main difficulties in the proof lie in the presence of 1/x-singularity in the equations at the origin and the additional nonlinear terms induced by the magnetic field. Solutions will be obtained as the limit of the approximate solutions in annular regions between two cylinders. Under certain growth assumption on the heat conductivity, we first derive a number of regularities of the approximate physical quantities in the fluid region, as well as a lot of uniform integrability in the entire spacetime domain. By virtue of these estimates we then argue in a similar manner as that in Ref. 20 to take the limit and show that the limiting functions are indeed a weak solution which satisfies the mass, momentum and magnetic field equations in the entire spacetime domain in the sense of distributions, but satisfies the energy equation only in the compact subsets of the fluid region. The analysis in this paper allows the possibility that energy be absorbed into the origin, i.e. the total energy is possibly lost in the limit as the inner radius goes to zero.