Stability of transonic shock fronts in two-dimensional Euler systems

We study the stability of stationary transonic shock fronts under two-dimensional perturbation in gas dynamics. The motion of the gas is described by the full Euler system. The system is hyperbolic ahead of the shock front, and is a hyperbolic-elliptic composed system behind the shock front. The stability of the shock front and the downstream flow under two-dimensional perturbation of the upstream flow can be reduced to a free boundary value problem of the hyperbolic-elliptic composed system. We develop a method to deal with boundary value problems for such systems. The crucial point is to decompose the system to a canonical form, in which the hyperbolic part and the elliptic part are only weakly coupled in their coefficients. By several sophisticated iterative processes we establish the existence and uniqueness of the solution to the described free boundary value problem. Our result indicates the stability of the transonic shock front and the flow field behind the shock.