Structural stability of subsonic steady states to the hydrodynamic model for semiconductors with sonic boundary

Abstract

Abstract The hydrodynamic model for semiconductors with sonic boundary, represented by Euler–Poisson equations, possesses the various physical steady states including interior-subsonic/interior-supersonic/shock-transonic/C 1-smooth-transonic steady states. Since these physical steady states result in some serious singularities at the sonic boundary (their gradients are infinity), this makes that the structural stability for these physical solutions is more difficult and challenging, and has remained open as we know. In this paper, we investigate the structural stability of interior subsonic steady states. Namely, when the doping profiles are as small perturbations, the differences between the corresponding subsonic solutions are also small. To overcome the singularities at the sonic boundary, we propose a novel approach, which combines the weighted multiplier technique, local singularity analysis, monotonicity argument and squeezing skill. Both the result itself and the technique developed here will give us some truly enlightening insights into our follow-up study on the structural stability of the remaining types of solutions. A number of numerical approximations are also carried out, which intuitively confirm our theoretical results.