Conditional stability of unstable viscous shocks (Q1025013)

The authors study linearly unstable Lax-type viscous shock solutions to a semilinear strictly parabolic system of conservation laws \(u_t + f(u)_x = u_{xx}\) with \(t,x\in\mathbb R\), \(u\in\mathbb R^n\), and smooth \(f\). It is shown that such solutions possess a translation-invariant center stable manifold of co-dimension \(p\) (where \(p\) is the number of unstable eigenvalues) within which they are nonlinearly orbitally stable with respect to small \(L^2\cap H^2\) perturbations. The case of \(p=0\) is considered. The case of ODE is considered, then these results are extended to semilinear parabolic PDE.