Global smooth solutions for 1D barotropic Navier-Stokes equations with a large class of degenerate viscosities

Abstract: We prove the global existence and uniqueness of smooth solutions to the one-dimensional barotropic Navier-Stokes system with degenerate viscosity $\mu(\rho)=\rho^\alpha$. We establish that the smooth solutions have possibly two different far-fields, and the initial density remains positive globally in time, for the initial data satisfying the same conditions. In addition, our result works for any $\alpha>0$, i.e., for a large class of degenerate viscosities. In particular, our models include the viscous shallow water equations. This extends the result of Constantin-Drivas-Nguyen-Pasqualotto \cite[Theorem 1.5]{CDNP} (on the case of periodic domain) to the case where smooth solutions connect possibly two different limits at the infinity on the whole space.