Stability of Degenerate Stationary Waves for Viscous Gases

This paper is concerned with the asymptotic stability of degenerate stationary waves for viscous gases in the half space. We discuss the following two cases: (1) viscous conservation laws and (2) damped wave equations with nonlinear convection. In each case, we prove that the solution converges to the corresponding degenerate stationary wave at the rate t^-α/4 as t → ∞, provided that the initial perturbation is in the weighted space L²_α=L²(ℝ₊;(1+x)^αdx). This convergence rate t^-α/4 is weaker than the one for the non-degenerate case and requires the restriction α < α_*(q), where α_*(q) is the critical value depending only on the degeneracy exponent q. Such a restriction is reasonable because the corresponding linearized operator for viscous conservation laws cannot be dissipative in L²_α for α > α ^*(q) with another critical value α^*(q). Our stability analysis is based on the space-time weighted energy method in which the spatial weight is chosen as a function of the degenerate stationary wave.