On the Zero-Dispersion Limit of the Benjamin-Ono Cauchy Problem for Positive Initial Data
Peter D. Miller and Zhengjie Xu
Department of Mathematics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Abstract:
We study the Cauchy initial-value problem for the Benjamin-Ono equation in the zero-dispersion limit, and we establish the existence of this limit in a certain weak sense by developing an appropriate analogue of the method invented by Lax and Levermore to analyze the corresponding limit for the Korteweg-de Vries equation.
Here is a physical experiment by Roberto Camassa and Richard McLaughlin of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, demonstrating the trapping of particles of a contaminant by a density interface whose motion can under some assumptions be modeled by the Benjamin-Ono equation: