Evolution and interaction of δ-waves in the zero-pressure gas dynamics system

Abstract

Evolution and interaction of plane waves of the multidimensional zero-pressure gas dynamics system leads to the study of the corresponding one dimensional system. In this paper, we study the initial value problem for one dimensional zero-pressure gas dynamics system. Here the first equation is the Burgers equation and the second one is the continuity equation. We consider the solution with initial data in the space of bounded Borel measures. First we prove a general existence result in the algebra of generalized functions of Colombeau. Then we study in detail special solutions with δ-measures as initial data. We study interaction of waves originating from initial data concentrated on two point sources and interaction with classical shock/rarefaction waves. This gives an understanding of plane-wave interactions in the multidimensional case. We use the vanishing viscosity method in our analysis as this gives the physical solution.