Advances In The Theory Of Shock Waves

Advances in the Theory of Shock Waves

Advances in the Theory of Shock Waves

In the field known as "the mathematical theory of shock waves," very exciting and unexpected developments have occurred in the last few years. Joel Smoller and Blake Temple have established classes of shock wave solutions to the Einstein Euler equations of general relativity; indeed, the mathematical and physical con sequences of these examples constitute a whole new area of research. The stability theory of "viscous" shock waves has received a new, geometric perspective due to the work of Kevin Zumbrun and collaborators, which offers a spectral approach to systems. Due to the intersection of point and essential spectrum, such an ap proach had for a long time seemed out of reach. The stability problem for "in viscid" shock waves has been given a novel, clear and concise treatment by Guy Metivier and coworkers through the use of paradifferential calculus. The L 1 semi group theory for systems of conservation laws, itself still a recent development, has been considerably condensed by the introduction of new distance functionals through Tai-Ping Liu and collaborators; these functionals compare solutions to different data by direct reference to their wave structure. The fundamental prop erties of systems with relaxation have found a systematic description through the papers of Wen-An Yong; for shock waves, this means a first general theorem on the existence of corresponding profiles. The five articles of this book reflect the above developments.

Shock Waves and Reaction—Diffusion Equations

For this edition, a number of typographical errors and minor slip-ups have been corrected. In addition, following the persistent encouragement of Olga Oleinik, I have added a new chapter, Chapter 25, which I titled "Recent Results." This chapter is divided into four sections, and in these I have discussed what I consider to be some of the important developments which have come about since the writing of the first edition. Section I deals with reaction-diffusion equations, and in it are described both the work of C. Jones, on the stability of the travelling wave for the Fitz-Hugh-Nagumo equations, and symmetry-breaking bifurcations. Section II deals with some recent results in shock-wave theory. The main topics considered are L. Tartar's notion of compensated compactness, together with its application to pairs of conservation laws, and T.-P. Liu's work on the stability of viscous profiles for shock waves. In the next section, Conley's connection index and connection matrix are described; these general notions are useful in con structing travelling waves for systems of nonlinear equations. The final sec tion, Section IV, is devoted to the very recent results of C. Jones and R. Gardner, whereby they construct a general theory enabling them to locate the point spectrum of a wide class of linear operators which arise in stability problems for travelling waves. Their theory is general enough to be applica ble to many interesting reaction-diffusion systems.