Existence of quasilinear relaxation shock profiles

We establish existence with sharp rates of decay and distance from the Chapman– Enskog approximation of small-amplitude quasilinear relaxation shocks in the general case that the profile ODE may become degenerate. Our method of analysis follows the general approach used by Métivier and Zumbrun in the semilinear case, based on Chapman–Enskog expansion and the macro–micro decomposition of Liu and Yu. In the quasilinear case, however, we find it necessary to apply a parameter-dependent Nash-Moser iteration to close the analysis, whereas, in the semilinear case, a simple contraction-mapping argument sufficed.