Nonlinear asymptotic stability of compressible vortex sheets with viscosity effects

This paper concerns the stabilizing effect of viscosity on the vortex sheets. It is found that although a vortex sheet is not a time-asymptotic attractor for the compressible Navier-Stokes equations, a viscous wave that approximates the vortex sheet on any finite time interval can be constructed explicitly, which is shown to be time-asymptotically stable in the $ L^\infty $-space with small perturbations, regardless of the amplitude of the vortex sheet. The result shows that the viscosity has a strong stabilizing effect on the vortex sheets, which are generally unstable for the ideal compressible Euler equations even for short time [26,8,1]. The proof is based on the $ L^2 $-energy method.In particular, the asymptotic stability of the vortex sheet under small spatially periodic perturbations is proved by studying the dynamics of these spatial oscillations. The first key point in our analysis is to construct an ansatz to cancel these oscillations. Then using the Galilean transformation, we are able to find a shift function of the vortex sheet such that an anti-derivative technique works, which plays an important role in the energy estimates. Moreover, by introducing a new variable and using the intrinsic properties of the vortex sheet, we can achieve the optimal decay rates to the viscous wave.