Abstract
We study the free boundary problem for the equations of compressible Euler equations with a vacuum boundary condition. Our main goal is to recover in Eulerian coordinates the earlier well‐posedness result obtained by Lindblad [11] for the isentropic Euler equations and extend it to the case of full gas dynamics. For technical simplicity we consider the case of an unbounded domain whose boundary has the form of a graph and make short comments about the case of a bounded domain. We prove the local‐in‐time existence in Sobolev spaces by the technique applied earlier to weakly stable shock waves and characteristic discontinuities [5, 12]. It contains, in particular, the reduction to a fixed domain, using the “good unknown” of Alinhac [1], and a suitable Nash‐Moser‐type iteration scheme. A certain modification of such an approach is caused by the fact that the symbol associated to the free surface is not elliptic. This approach is still directly applicable to the relativistic version of our problem in the setting of special relativity, and we briefly discuss its extension to general relativity. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.