English

Traveling waves near shear flows for the inhomogeneous Euler equations with non-constant density

Analysis of PDEs 2026-02-03 v1

Abstract

We investigate the existence and nonexistence of traveling wave solutions near monotonic shear flows with non-constant background density for the two-dimensional inhomogeneous Euler equations in a finite channel. For any small τ>0\tau>0, first, we construct nontrivial traveling waves with velocity and density in H5/2τH^{5/2-\tau} and H3/2τH^{3/2-\tau}, respectively, showing that inviscid damping fails at these regularities. Second, when the distorted Rayleigh operator has no eigenvalues, we prove that such traveling wave solutions cannot exist in higher regularity spaces (H5/2+τH^{5/2+\tau} for velocity and H3/2+τH^{3/2+\tau} for density).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.00824,
  title  = {Traveling waves near shear flows for the inhomogeneous Euler equations with non-constant density},
  author = {Qi Zhao and Weiren Zhao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.00824},
  year   = {2026}
}