Long-time stability of a stably stratified rest state in the inviscid 2D Boussinesq equation

TL;DR

This paper proves the long-time nonlinear stability of a stratified rest state in the inviscid 2D Boussinesq system, leveraging dispersive effects from internal gravity waves and advanced nonlinear analysis techniques.

Contribution

It establishes the nonlinear stability over a timescale of order / of a stratified rest state in the inviscid Boussinesq system, extending to related dispersive SQG equations, using partial symmetries.

Findings

Nonlinear stability holds for timescales / with small perturbations.

Dispersive effects induce amplitude decay at rate t^{-1/2}.

Analysis of nonlinear interactions via partial symmetries is key to the proof.

Abstract

We establish the nonlinear stability on a timescale $O(\varepsilon^{-2})$ of a linearly, stably stratified rest state in the inviscid Boussinesq system on $\mathbb{R}^2$. Here $\varepsilon>0$ denotes the size of an initially sufficiently small, Sobolev regular and localized perturbation. A similar statement also holds for the related dispersive SQG equation. At the core of this result is a dispersive effect due to anisotropic internal gravity waves. At the linearized level, this gives rise to amplitude decay at a rate of $t^{-1/2}$, as observed in [EW15]. We establish a refined version of this, and propagate nonlinear control via a detailed analysis of nonlinear interactions using the method of partial symmetries developed in [GPW23].