| Abstract: | The nature of the instability of the surface of a tangential velocity discontinuity between two incompressible, inviscid, capillary, nonconducting, linearly magnetizable fluids in an external magnetic field is considered. An absolute instability criterion is obtained in analytic form. When the gravity force is negligible, this criterion does not depend on the value of the surface tension. When the surface tension is negligible, the absolute instability criterion is obtained for the region of the flow parameters in which the causality condition for the system in question is satisfied. If the magnetic field is tangential to the interface, all the criteria obtained are also applicable to the case of nonmagnetic, perfectly conducting fluids, i.e., to the case of ideal magnetohydrodynamics.Moscow. Translated from Izvestiya Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk, Mekhanika Zhidkosti i Gaza, No. 5, pp. 21–26, September–October, 1995. |
