Finite-time Singularity Formation for Strong Solutions to the Boussinesq System

TL;DR

This paper constructs explicit finite-energy, smooth initial data for the 2D Boussinesq system that lead to finite-time singularities, advancing understanding of the system's potential for blow-up.

Contribution

It provides the first examples of finite-energy, smooth solutions to the Boussinesq system that develop singularities in finite time, using scale-invariant solutions and critical space analysis.

Findings

Finite-energy solutions can become singular in finite time.

Singularities arise from vorticity amplification due to density gradients.

Methods may extend to solutions on the half-space domain.

Abstract

The global regularity problem for the Boussinesq system is a well known open problem in mathematical fluid dynamics. As a follow up to our work \cite{EJSI}, we give examples of finite-energy and Lipschitz continuous velocity field and density $(u_0,\rho_0)$ which are $C^\infty$-smooth away from the origin and belong to a natural local well-posedness class for the Boussinesq equation whose corresponding local solution becomes singular in finite time. That is, while the sup norm of the gradient of the velocity field and the density remain finite on the time interval $t\in [0,1)$, both quantities become infinite as $t\rightarrow 1$. The key is to use scale-invariant solutions similar to those introduced in \cite{EJSI}. The proof consists of three parts: local well-posedness for the Boussinesq equation in critical spaces, the analysis of certain special infinite-energy solutions belonging to those critical spaces, and finally a cut-off argument to ensure finiteness of energy. All of this is done on spatial domains $\{(x_1,x_2): x_1 \ge \gamma|x_2|\}$ for any $\gamma > 0$ so that we can get arbitrarily close to the half-space case. We remark that the $2D$ Euler equation is globally well-posed in all of the situations we look at, so that the singularity is not coming from the domain or the lack of smoothness on the data but from the vorticity amplification due to the presence of a density gradient. It is conceivable that our methods can be adapted to produce finite-energy $C^\infty$ solutions on $\mathbb{R}^2_+$ which become singular in finite time.