Local Theory in Critical Spaces for Compressible Viscous and Heat-Conductive Gases

We are concerned with local existence and uniqueness of solutions for a general model of viscous and heat-conductive gases with low regularity assumptions on the initial data (the velocity and the temperature may be discontinuous). Local well-posedness is showed to hold in spaces which are critical with respect to the scaling of the equations, provided that the initial density is close enough to a positive constant. When initial data are a trifle more regular, local well-posedness holds for any initial density bounded away from zero. This former result lies on new estimates for linear heat equations with a non constant diffusion coefficient.