Unstable and Stable Galaxy Models

To determine the stability and instability of a given steady galaxy configuration is one of the fundamental problems in the Vlasov theory for galaxy dynamics. In this article, we study the stability of isotropic spherical symmetric galaxy models $f_{0}(E)$, for which the distribution function $f_{0}$ depends on the particle energy $E$ only. In the first part of the article, we derive the first sufficient criterion for linear instability of $f_{0}(E):$ $f_{0}(E)$ is linearly unstable if the second-order operator $$A_{0}\equiv-\Delta+4\pi\int f_{0}^{\prime}(E)\{I-\mathcal{P}\}dv$$ has a negative direction, where $\mathcal{P}$ is the projection onto the function space $\{g(E,L)\},$ $L$ being the angular momentum [see the explicit formula (\ref{A0-radial})]. In the second part of the article, we prove that for the important King model, the corresponding $A_{0}$ is positive definite. Such a positivity leads to the nonlinear stability of the King model under all spherically symmetric perturbations.Comment: to appear in Comm. Math. Phy

Compressible, inviscid Rayleigh-Taylor instability

We consider the Rayleigh-Taylor problem for two compressible, immiscible, inviscid, barotropic fluids evolving with a free interface in the presence of a uniform gravitational field. After constructing Rayleigh-Taylor steady-state solutions with a denser fluid lying above the free interface with the second fluid, we turn to an analysis of the equations obtained from linearizing around such a steady state. By a natural variational approach, we construct normal mode solutions that grow exponentially in time with rate like e^{t \sqrt{\abs{\xi}}}, where $\xi$ is the spatial frequency of the normal mode. A Fourier synthesis of these normal mode solutions allows us to construct solutions that grow arbitrarily quickly in the Sobolev space $H^k$, which leads to an ill-posedness result for the linearized problem. Using these pathological solutions, we then demonstrate ill-posedness for the original non-linear problem in an appropriate sense. More precisely, we use a contradiction argument to show that the non-linear problem does not admit reasonable estimates of solutions for small time in terms of the initial data.Comment: 31 pages; v2: updated grant informatio