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| We investigate the instability of a smooth Rayleigh-Taylor steady-state solution to compressible viscous flows without heat conductivity in the presence of a uniform gravitational field in a bounded domain with smooth boundary. We show that the steady-state is linearly unstable by constructing a suitable energy functional and exploiting arguments of the modified variational method. Then, based on the constructed linearly unstable solutions and a local well-posedness result of classical solutions to the original nonlinear problem, we further reconstruct the initial data of linearly unstable solutions to be the one of the original nonlinear problem and establish an appropriate energy estimate of Gronwall-type. With the help of the established energy estimate, we show that the steady-state is nonlinearly unstable in the sense of Hadamard by a careful bootstrap argument. As a byproduct of our analysis, we find that the compressibility has no stabilizing effect in the linearized problem for compressible viscous flows without heat conductivity. (joint work with Fei Jiang) |
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