LAUSR

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to study the nonlinear stability of rarefaction waves for the one-dimensional bipolar Vlasov-Poisson-Boltzmann system with hard potentials. To this end, we first construct the global solutions near a local Maxwellian for the bipolar Vlasov-Poisson-Boltzmann system. Then the time asymptotic stability of rarefaction waves to compressible Euler equations is proved for the bipolar Vlasov-Poisson-Boltzmann system. Moreover, the exponential time decay rates of the disparity between two species and the electric field are obtained. Our analysis is based on the two different sets of decompositions of the solutions and a time velocity weight function which is designed to control the large velocity growth in the nonlinear term.