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Linear Stability of Compressible Vortex Sheets in Two-Dimensional Elastodynamics

The linear stability of rectilinear compressible vortex sheets is studied for two-dimensional isentropic elastic flows. This problem has a free boundary and the boundary is characteristic. A necessary and sufficient condition is obtained for the linear stability of the rectilinear vortex sheets. More precisely, it is shown that, besides the stable supersonic zone, the elasticity exerts an additional stable subsonic zone. A new feature for elastic flow is found that there is a class of states in the interior of subsonic zone where the stability of such states is weaker than the stability of other states in the sense that there is an extra loss of tangential derivatives with respect to the source terms. This is a new feature which Euler flows do not possess. One of the difficulties for the elastic flow is that the non-differentiable points of the eigenvalues may coincide with the roots of the Lopatinskii determinant. As a result, the Kreiss symmetrization cannot be applied directly. Instead, we perform an upper triangularization of the system to separate only the outgoing modes at all points in the frequency space, so that an exact estimate of the outgoing modes can be obtained. Moreover, all the outgoing modes are shown to be zero due to the $L^2$-regularity of solutions. The estimates for the incoming modes can be derived directly from the Lopatinskii determinant. This new approach avoids the lengthy computation and estimates for the outgoing modes when Kreiss symmetrization is applied. This method can also be applied to the Euler flows and MHD flows.