Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2009
We study systems which in characteristic coordinates have the form
where A is a k × k diagonal matrix with distinct real eigenvalues. The nonlinearity F is assumed to be asymptotically homogeneous in the sense, that it is a sum of two terms, one positively homogeneous of degree one in u and a second which is sublinear in u and vanishes when u = 0. In this case, F(t, x, u(t)) is meaningful provided that u(t) is a Radon measure, and, for Radon measure initial data there is a unique solution (Theorem 2.1).
The main result asserts that if μn is a sequence of initial data such that, in characteristic coordinates, the positive and negative parts of each component, , converge weakly to μ±, then the solutions coverge weakly and the limit has an interesting description given by a nonlinear superposition principle.
Simple weak converge of the initial data does not imply weak convergence of the solutions.