Stability and causality of Carter’s multifluid theory

Abstract

Stability and causality are studied for linear perturbations about equilibrium in Carter’s multifluid theory. Our stability analysis is grounded on the requirement that the entropy of the multifluid, plus that of the environment, must be maximised at equilibrium. This allows us to compute a quadratic Lyapunov functional, whose positive definiteness implies stability. Furthermore, we verify explicitly that, also for multifluids, thermodynamic stability implies linear causality. As a notable stability condition, we find that the entrainment matrix must always be positive definite, confirming a widespread intuition.