Hyperbolic conservation laws with umbilic degeneracy. I (Q1894125)

The authors develop techniques of compensated compactness in order to prove the existence of global entropy solutions of the Cauchy problem for a class of systems of two hyperbolic conservation laws with homogeneous quadratic nonlinearities. The analysis involves the careful construction of a family of entropy functions, and estimates of Riemann invariants near the origin, where the characteristic speeds coincide. The main result is the existence globally in time of a weak solution of the Cauchy problem for arbitrary data in \(L^\infty\).