Barotropic shearing-wave gravitational amplitude system Created 2026-10-07 Updated 2026-10-14
A shearing-wave ansatz in a uniform inviscid isothermal shearing sheet removes background advection when the radial wavevector grows as . The razor-thin disk Poisson kernel reduces the pressure-plus-gravity amplitude to . Continuity couples it to , while the two momentum equations have rotational couplings and . The linearized vortensity amplitude remains constant, because the barotropic pressure and gravitational forces have zero curl and the background vortensity is uniform.
For a radial mode with constant nonzero wavenumber in an inviscid razor-thin disc, eliminate velocity using continuity and the conserved linearized vortensity. The resulting oscillator has . The vortensity gives a constant forcing and hence the stationary balanced component when . It is lost by an ansatz that divides every amplitude equation by a nonzero frequency. Negative squared frequency gives exponential instability; zero frequency allows secular growth.
Write , , and . Differentiation, including , gives
The two pressure/self-gravity cross terms cancel. Continuity gives , so . Consequently
The conserved amplitude is linearized vortensity: the perturbation of the absolute vertical vorticity divided by surface density,
A two-dimensional inviscid barotropic fluid materially conserves this potential vorticity. Both pressure enthalpy and gravitational forces are gradients, so they create no baroclinic vorticity source. Since is uniform, its linear perturbation obeys , explaining why a shearing wave has constant vortensity amplitude.
The linearized vortensity amplitude is
Since the exact vortensity obeys and the time-dependent cancels the background shear in the phase, linearization gives
On the zero-vortensity branch,
Substitution in the two momentum equations yields the linear system of differential equations
with
where is the result from part (ii).