Instability of vanishing viscosity approximation to hyperbolic systems of conservation laws with rotational invariance (Q752317)

It is well known that weak solutions to a hyperbolic system of conservation laws \[ (1)\quad u_ t+(f(u))_ x=0 \] can be defined as vanishing viscosity limits of solutions to an associated family of parabolic systems \[ (2)\quad u^{\nu}_ t+(f(u^{\nu}))_ x=\nu (B(u^{\nu})u^{\nu}_ x)_ x,\quad \nu >0. \] The author is concerned both with linear stability of discontinuous weak solutions \[ (3)\quad u(x,t)=u^-,\quad x<st;\quad u(x,t)=u^+,\quad x>st \] to (1) which admit a viscous profile and with uniqueness of vanishing viscosity limits as solutions to the Riemann problem. In particular, linear stability means well-posedness of the linearization of (1) around (3), and a viscous profile v is a solution to the system \[ B(v)v'=f(v)-sv- c,\quad c:=f(u^-)-su^-=f(u^+)-su^+ \] connecting the states \(u^-\), \(u^+\) in the sense that \(v(-\infty)=u^-\) and \(v(+\infty)=u^+\). While it has been shown by \textit{A. Majda} and \textit{R. L. Pego} [J. Differ. Equations 56, 229-262 (1985; Zbl 0512.76067)] that linear stability and the existence of a viscous profile are in some local sense equivalent if (1) is strictly hyperbolic and (2) is strictly stable, the main result of the author states that this equivalence does not hold true in general. To be more specific, it is shown that if (2) is strictly stable and (1), (2) are rotationally invariant of degree \(m\geq 2\) of symmetry there exist discontinuous solutions (3) to (1) which have a viscous profile but are not linearly stable. As a consequence, the solution to the Riemann problem is nonunique in the sense that it admits at least two vanishing viscosity limits for initial data arbitrarily close to a symmetry invariant point in state space.