Conservation Laws Possessing Contact Characteristic Fields with Singularities

In many applications, there arise systems of two nonlinear conservation laws with a single linearly degenerate characteristic field, or contact field, the speed of which may coincide with that of the genuinely nonlinear characteristic field along a curve. Along this coincidence curve, the contact field may have isolated singular points. We prove that under generic assumptions the singular points can be centers or saddles for the contact field. We construct the local Riemann solution for each of the two generic cases. This work sheds light on the classification of local Riemann solutions of systems of two conservation laws with a linearly degenerate characteristic field.