The onset of instability in first-order systems

Nicolas Lerner, Ben Texier and I have just submitted to arxiv our long paper on “The onset of instability in first-order systems”, in which we prove the Hadamard’s instability for first-order quasilinear systems that lose its hyperbolicity in positive times. Precisely, we consider the Cauchy problem for the following first-order systems of partial differential equations:

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Math 597F, Notes 8: unstable Orr-Sommerfeld solutions for stable profiles

We now turn to the delicate case: Orr-Sommerfeld solutions for stable profiles to Rayleigh. The results reported here are in a joint work with E. Grenier and Y. Guo, directing some tedious details of the proof to our paper. We consider the Orr-Sommerfeld problem:

\displaystyle Ray_\alpha(\phi) = \epsilon \Delta_\alpha ^2 \phi,

with zero boundary conditions on {\phi} and {\phi'}, in which {Ray_\alpha(\cdot)} denotes the Rayleigh operator and {\Delta_\alpha = \partial_z^2 - \alpha^2}.

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