The Rayleigh-Taylor instability of incompressible Euler equations in a horizontal slab domain (Q2669939)

The authors study the nonlinear Rayleigh-Taylor instability in 2D incompressible inviscid flows. The model system under study is the incompressible Euler equations in a horizontal slab domain, on the boundary of which the slip-boundary condition is imposed. By applying the approach of growing normal modes of the linearized equations around a smooth steady state (the basic flow), and employing the variational method to find a dominant eigenvalue with positive real part, the authors are able to show that if a steady density profile is non-monotonic, then the smooth steady state is nonlinearly unstable. As a by-product, the authors also give a new proof of the local existence for the inhomogeneous incompressible Euler equations in a smooth bounded domain \(\Omega\subset{\mathbb R}^n\) with initial data in \(H^s\) (\(s > n/2 +1\)). This paper generalizes the results in [\textit{H. J. Hwang} and \textit{Y. Guo}, Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal. 167, No. 3, 235--253 (2003; Zbl 1090.76527)] by taking into account the boundary condition.