English

The Rayleigh-Taylor instability with local energy dissipation

Analysis of PDEs 2025-10-29 v1

Abstract

We consider the inhomogeneous incompressible Euler equations including their local energy inequality as a differential inclusion. Providing a corresponding convex integration theorem and constructing subsolutions, we show the existence of locally dissipative Euler flows emanating from the horizontally flat Rayleigh-Taylor configuration and having a mixing zone which grows quadratically in time. For the Rayleigh-Taylor instability these are the first turbulently mixing solutions known to respect local energy dissipation, and outside the range of Atwood numbers considered in arXiv:2002.08843, the first weakly admissible solutions in general. In the coarse grained picture the existence relies on one-dimensional subsolutions described by a family of hyperbolic conservation laws, among which one can find the optimal background profile appearing in the scale invariant bounds from arXiv:2303.01889, and as we show, the optimal conservation law with respect to maximization of the total energy dissipation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.03278,
  title  = {The Rayleigh-Taylor instability with local energy dissipation},
  author = {Björn Gebhard and József J. Kolumbán},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.03278},
  year   = {2025}
}