Paper detail

High-frequency stability of multidimensional ZND detonations

The rigorous study of spectral stability of strong detonations was begun by Erpenbeck in the 1960s. Working with the Zeldovitch-von Neumann-Döring (ZND) model, he identified two fundamental classes of detonation profiles, referred to as those of decreasing (D) and increasing (I) type, which appeared to exhibit very different behavior with respect to high-frequency perturbations. Using a combination of rigorous and non-rigorous arguments, Erpenbeck concluded that type I detonations were unstable to some oscillatory perturbations for which the (vector) frequency was of arbitrarily large magnitude, while type D detonations were stable provided the frequency magnitude was sufficiently high. For type D detonations Erpenbeck's methods did not allow him to obtain a cutoff magnitude for stability that was \emph{uniform} with respect to frequency direction. Thus, he left open the question whether the cutoff magnitude for stability might approach $+\infty$ as certain frequency directions were approached. In this paper we show by quite different methods that for type D detonations there exists a uniform cutoff magnitude for stability independent of frequency direction. By reducing the search for unstable frequencies to a bounded frequency set, the uniform cutoff obtained here is a key step toward the rigorous validation of a number of results in the computational detonation literature. The main difficulty in the analysis is to treat "turning points at infinity".