Stability of relativistic plasma-vacuum interfaces

Abstract

We study the plasma-vacuum interface problem in relativistic magnetohydrodynamics for the case when the plasma density does not go to zero continuously, but jumps. In the vacuum region we consider the Maxwell equations for electric and magnetic fields. We show that a sufficiently large vacuum electric field can make the planar interface violently unstable. By using a suitable secondary symmetrization of the vacuum Maxwell equations, we find a sufficient condition that precludes violent instabilities. Under this condition we derive an energy a priori estimate in the anisotropic weighted Sobolev space $H^1_*$ for the variable coefficients linearized problem for nonplanar plasma-vacuum interfaces.