Stability of travelling wave solutions to a semilinear hyperbolic system with relaxation

We study a semilinear hyperbolic system with relaxation and investigate the asymptotic stability of travelling wave solutions with shock profile. It is shown that the travelling wave solution is asymptotically stable, provided the initial disturbance is suitably small. Moreover, we show that the time convergence rate is polynomially (resp. exponentially) fast as t→∞ if the initial disturbance decays polynomially (resp. exponentially) for x→∞. Our proofs are based on the space–time weighted energy method. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.