Stability of multidimensional undercompressive shock waves

This paper is devoted to the study of linear and nonlinear stability of undercompressive shock waves for first order systems of hyperbolic conservation laws in several space dimensions. We first recall the framework proposed by Freistuhler to extend Majda’s work on classical shock waves to undercompressive shock waves. Then we show how the so-called uniform stability condition yields a linear stability result in terms of a maximal L2 estimate. We follow Majda’s strategy on shock waves with several improvements and modifications inspired from Metivier’s work. The linearized problems are solved by duality and the nonlinear equations by mean of a Newton type iteration scheme. Finally, we show how this work applies to phase transitions in an isothermal van der Waals fluid.