Existence and stability of traveling wave solutions to first-order quasilinear hyperbolic systems (Q385979)

The Cauchy problem for a first-order quasilinear strictly hyperbolic system \[ \frac{\partial u}{\partial t}+A(u)\frac{\partial u}{\partial x}=0, \] is considered. The paper is concerned with the existence and stability of traveling wave solutions. Explicit formulas for the \(n\) families of \(C^{1}\) traveling wave solutions to homogeneous quasilinear hyperbolic system with linearly degenerate characteristic fields are obtained, by means of semi-global normalized coordinates established in a neighborhood of a characteristic trajectory. To prove the stability of the leftmost and rightmost families of traveling wave solutions a new kind of formulas of wave decompositions are drived. As an application, the 1-D system of the Chaplygin gas is discussed. For the intermediate families of traveling wave solutions, their possible instability is illustrated by two examples.