A new upper bound for the largest growth rate of linear Rayleigh–Taylor instability

Abstract

We investigate the effect of (interface) surface tensor on the linear Rayleigh–Taylor (RT) instability in stratified incompressible viscous fluids. The existence of linear RT instability solutions with largest growth rate Λ is proved under the instability condition (i.e., the surface tension coefficient ϑ is less than a threshold $\vartheta _{\mathrm{c}}$ ϑ c ) by the modified variational method of PDEs. Moreover, we find a new upper bound for Λ. In particular, we directly observe from the upper bound that Λ decreasingly converges to zero as ϑ goes from zero to the threshold $\vartheta _{\mathrm{c}}$ ϑ c .