Formation of singularities in one-dimensional Chaplygin gas

We investigate the formation and propagation of singularities for the system of one-dimensional Chaplygin gas. Under suitable assumptions we construct a physically meaningful solution containing a new type of singularities called delta-like solution for this kind of quasilinear hyperbolic system with linearly degenerate characteristics. By a careful analysis, we study the behavior of the solution in a neighborhood of a blow-up point. The formation of this new kind of singularities is related to the envelop of different characteristic families, instead of characteristics of the same family in the standard situation. This shows that the blow-up phenomenon for systems with linearly degenerate characteristics is quite different from the problem of shock formation for the system with genuinely nonlinear characteristic fields. Different initial data can lead to different delta-like singularities: the delta-like singularity with point-shape and the delta-like singularity with line-shape.