Existence and asymptotic stability of relaxation discrete shock profiles

In this paper we study the asymptotic nonlinear stability of discrete shocks of the relaxing scheme for approximating the general system of nonlinear hyperbolic conservation laws. The existence of discrete shocks is established by suitable manifold construction, and it is shown that weak single discrete shocks for such a scheme are nonlinearly stable in L2, provided that the sums of the initial perturbations equal zero. These results should shed light on the convergence of the numerical solution constructed by the relaxing scheme for the single shock solution of the system of hyperbolic conservation laws. These results are proved by using both a weighted norm estimate and a characteristic energy method based on the internal structures of the discrete shocks.