Paper detail

On the Rayleigh-Taylor instability for incompressible viscous magnetohydrodynamic equations

We study the Rayleigh-Taylor problem for two incompressible, immiscible, viscous magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) flows, with zero resistivity, surface tension (or without surface tenstion) and special initial magnetic field, evolving with a free interface in the presence of a uniform gravitational field. First, we reformulate in Lagrangian coordinates MHD equations in a infinite slab as one for the Navier-Stokes equations with a force term induced by the fluid flow map. Then we analyze the linearized problem around the steady state which describes a denser immiscible fluid lying above a light one with an free interface separating the two fluids, and both fluids being in (unstable) equilibrium. By a general method of studying a family of modified variational problems, we construct smooth (when restricted to each fluid domain) solutions to the linearized problem that grow exponentially fast in time in Sobolev spaces, thus leading to an global instability result for the linearized problem. Finally, using these pathological solutions, we demonstrate the global instability for the corresponding nonlinear problem in an appropriate sense. In addition, we compute that the so-called critical number indeed is equal $\sqrt{g[\varrho]/2}$.