On the development of shocks in fluids

Abstract

In my 2007 work, I studied the formation of shocks in the context of Eulerian equations of the mechanics of compressible fluids. That work studied the maximal classical development of smooth initial data. The present review article is a presentation of my 2019 work, which addresses the problem of the physical continuation of the solution past the point of shock formation. The problem requires the construction of a hypersurface, the shock hypersurface, originating from a given singular spacelike surface, which is acoustically spacelike as viewed from its past, and the construction of a new solution in the future of the union of a given regular null hypersurface with the shock hypersurface, a solution which extends continuously the prior maximal classical solution across the given regular null hypersurface, but which displays discontinuities in physical variables across the shock hypersurface in accordance with the mass, momentum, and energy conservation laws. Moreover, the shock hypersurface is to be acoustically timelike as viewed from its future. Mathematically, this is a free boundary problem, with nonlinear conditions at the free boundary, for a first order quasilinear hyperbolic system of PDE, with characteristic initial data, which are singular at the past boundary of the initial null hypersurface, that boundary being the singular surface of origin. My 2019 work solved a restricted form of the problem through the introduction of new geometric and analytic methods. This Review is focused on the presentation of these methods.