Mechanism of the formation of singularities for quasilinear hyperbolic systems with linearly degenerate characteristic fields

One often believes that there is no shock formation for the Cauchy problem of quasilinear hyperbolic systems (of conservation laws) with linearly degenerate characteristic fields; It has been a conjecture for a long time (see Arch. Rational Mech. Anal. 2004; 172:65-91; Compressible Fluid Flow and Systems of Conservation Laws in Several Space Variables. Springer: New York, 1984) and it is still an open problem in the general situation up to now. In this paper, a framework to justify this conjecture is proposed, and, by means of the concept such as the strict block hyperbolicity, the part richness and the successively block-closed system, some general kinds of quasilinear hyperbolic systems, which verify the conjecture, are given. Copyright (C) 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.