Relaxation limit and initial layer to hydrodynamic models for semiconductors (Q994298)

This paper studies rigorously the relation between a drift-diffusion and a hydrodynamic model for semiconductors. The hydrodynamic model consists of two balance equations for the electron density and momentum coupled to the Poisson equation for the electric potential. A relaxation approximation is used for the momentum production term. The drift-diffusion model can be formally derived from the hydrodynamic one by letting a physical parameter tend to zero: the square of the momentum relaxation time. In the paper it is shown that the solution of the hydrodynamic model converges globally in time to that of the drift-diffusion one, as the physical parameter goes to zero. For both models, it is also shown that the respective solutions converge to the corresponding stationary solutions as time goes to infinity. The initial data of the hydrodynamic model can be taken arbitrarily large provided that the relaxation time is sufficiently small. In fact the initial layer decays exponentially fast as time goes to infinity and/or the relaxation time tends to zero. Energy methods are used for the decay estimates of solutions.