Classical solutions for the compressible liquid crystal flows with nonnegative initial densities

In this paper, we study the Cauchy problem of the simplified Ericksen-Leslie system modeling compressible nematic liquid crystal flows in R3. We first prove the local existence of the strong solutions provided that the data satisfies a natural compatibility condition. Then by deriving the smoothing effect of the solution in t>0, we conclude that it is indeed classical on some time interval [0,T0]. Here we do not need the condition that initial density is bounded below away from zero.