Existence and uniqueness of singular solutions for a conservation law arising in magnetohydrodynamics

The Brio system is a two-by-two system of conservation laws arising as a simplified model in ideal magnetohydrodynamics. The system has the form partial derivative(t)u + partial derivative(x)(u(2) + v(2)/2) = 0, partial derivative(t)v + partial derivative(x)(v(u - 1))= 0. It was found in previous works that the standard theory of hyperbolic conservation laws does not apply to this system since the characteristic fields are not genuinely nonlinear on the set v = 0. As a consequence, certain Riemann problems have no weak solutions in the traditional Lax admissible sense. It was argued in Hayes and LeFloch (1996 Nonlinearity 9 1547-63) that in order to solve the system, singular solutions containing Dirac masses along the shock waves might have to be used. Solutions of this type were exhibited in Kalisch and Mitrovic (2012 Proc. Edinburgh Math. Soc. 55 711-29) and Sarrico (2015 Russ. J. Math. Phys. 22 518-27), but uniqueness was not obtained. In the current work, we introduce a nonlinear change of variables which makes it possible to solve the Riemann problem in the framework of the standard theory of conservation laws. In addition, we develop a criterion which leads to an admissibility condition for singular solutions of the original system, and it can be shown that admissible solutions are unique in the framework developed here.