Shock formation in solutions to the 2D compressible Euler equations in the presence of non-zero vorticity

Abstract

We study the Cauchy problem for the compressible Euler equations in two spatial dimensions under any physical barotropic equation of state except that of a Chaplygin gas. We prove that the well-known phenomenon of shock formation in simple plane wave solutions, starting from smooth initial data, is stable under perturbations of the initial data that break the plane symmetry. Moreover, we provide a sharp asymptotic description of the singularity formation. The new feature of our work is that the perturbed solutions are allowed to have small but non-zero vorticity, even at the location of the shock. Thus, our results provide the first constructive description of the vorticity near a singularity formed from compression. Specifically, the vorticity remains uniformly bounded, while the vorticity divided by the density exhibits even more regular behavior: the ratio remains uniformly Lipschitz relative to the standard Cartesian coordinates. To control the vorticity, we rely on a coalition of new geometric and analytic insights that complement the ones used by Christodoulou in his groundbreaking, sharp proof of shock formation in vorticity-free regions. In particular, we rely on a new formulation of the compressible Euler equations (derived in a companion article) exhibiting remarkable structures. To derive estimates, we construct an eikonal function adapted to the acoustic characteristics (which correspond to sound wave propagation) and a related set of geometric coordinates and differential operators. Thanks to the remarkable structure of the equations, the same set of coordinates and differential operators can be used to analyze the vorticity, whose characteristics are transversal to the acoustic characteristics. In particular, our work provides the first constructive description of shock formation without symmetry assumptions in a system with multiple speeds.