Rayleigh-Taylor Instability in Stratified Compressible Fluids with/without the Interfacial Surface Tension

TL;DR

This paper proves the nonlinear Rayleigh--Taylor instability in stratified compressible fluids, extending previous linear results by developing an innovative approximation scheme that handles non-periodic solutions.

Contribution

It introduces a new approximate scheme to verify nonlinear instability, overcoming the challenge of constructing non-periodic growing mode solutions.

Findings

Nonlinear Rayleigh--Taylor instability is rigorously established.

The new scheme approximates non-periodic solutions with periodic ones.

Method applicable to other non-periodic instability problems.

Abstract

Guo--Tice formally established in 2011 that the Rayleigh--Taylor instability inevitably occurs within stratified compressible viscous fluids in a slab domain $\mathbb{R}^2\times (h_-,h_+)$, irrespecive of the presence of interfacial surface tension, where the instability solutions are non-periodic with respect to both horizontal spacial variables $x_1$ and $x_2$, by applying a so-called ''normal mode'' method and a modified variational method to the linearized (motion) equations. It is a long-standing open problem, however, whether Guo--Tice's conclusion can be rigorously verified by the (original) nonlinear equations. This challenge arises due to the failure of constructing a growing mode solution, which is non-periodic with respect to both horizontal spacial variables, to the linearized equations defined on a slab domain. In the present work, we circumvent the difficulty related to growing mode solutions by developing an alternative approximate scheme. In essence, our approach hinges on constructing the horizontally periodic growing mode solution of the linearized equations to approximate the {\it nonlinear} Rayleigh--Taylor instability solutions, which do not exhibit horizontal periodicity. Thanks to this new approximate scheme, we can apply Guo--Hallstrom--Spirn's bootstrap instability method to the nonlinear equations in Lagrangian coordinates, and thus prove Guo--Tice's conclusion. In particular, our approximate method could also be applied to other instability solutions characterized by non-periodic motion in a slab domain, such as the Parker instability and thermal instability.