A case study in vanishing viscosity (Q5936430)

In the past ten years the so-called semigroup method was developed in order to prove existence, uniqueness, and well-posedness for systems of hyperbolic conservation laws with initial data of small size and small total variation. The present paper is concerned with an extension of this approach to viscous conservation laws \(u_t + f(u)_x = \varepsilon u_{xx}\) in one space dimension. The paper contains one important step in the program: a special \(2\times 2\)-system is investigated in which waves of the same family can interact. The authors introduce two new functionals to show uniform bounds on the total variation of the solution and convergence of the solutions in the limit \(\varepsilon \to 0\). The Lyapunov functionals used in the proof are motivated by geometric considerations. The results of this paper can be considered as a major step on the way to a general result relating the Riemann semigroup approach and the vanishing viscosity approximation for general \(n\times n\) systems of strictly hyperbolic conservation laws.