Supersensitive Boundary Value Problems

We consider the interesting, but relatively uncommon, situation when the boundary value problem for the steady-state Burgers’ equation has an interior shock layer. An expansion procedure utilizing exponentially small terms shows that a variety of asymptotically exponentially small perturbations can change the shock location by order one when the diffusion coefficient tends to zero. Such supersensitivity is expected for solutions to far more general boundary value problems. This suggests why computation of shocks is so challenging.