The large time stability of sound waves (Q1924051)

We demonstrate the existence of solutions to the full \(3 \times 3\) system of compressible Euler equations in one space dimension, up to an arbitrary time \(T>0\), in the case when the initial data have arbitrarily large total variation, and sufficiently small supnorm. The result applies to periodic solutions of the Euler equations, a nonlinear model for sound wave propagation in gas dynamics. Our analysis establishes a growth rate for the total variation that depends on a new length scale \(d\) that we identify in the problem. In the limit \(d \to \infty\), we recover Glimm's theorem, and we observe that there exist linearly degenerate systems within the class considered for which the growth rate we obtain is sharp.