Asymptotic stability of composite waves of shock profile and rarefaction for the Navier-Stokes-Poisson system

Abstract

We study the stability of composite waves consisting of a shock profile and a rarefaction wave for the one-dimensional isothermal Navier--Stokes--Poisson (NSP) system, which describes the ion dynamics in a collision-dominated plasma. More precisely, we prove that if the initial data are sufficiently close in the $H^2$ norm to the Riemann data corresponding to a solution consisting of a shock and a rarefaction wave of the associated quasi-neutral Euler system, then the solution to the Cauchy problem for the NSP system converges, up to a dynamical shift, to a superposition of the corresponding shock profile and the rarefaction wave as time tends to infinity. Our proof is based on the method of $a$-contraction with shifts, which has recently been applied to the Navier--Stokes equations to establish the asymptotic stability of composite waves. To adapt this method to the NSP system, we employ a modulated relative functional introduced in our previous work on the stability of single shock profiles.