Symmetry in stationary and uniformly-rotating solutions of active scalar equations

TL;DR

This paper proves that stationary and uniformly-rotating solutions of 2D Euler and gSQG equations exhibit radial symmetry under certain conditions, resolving several open questions and introducing new variational methods.

Contribution

It establishes sharp symmetry results for solutions of 2D Euler and gSQG equations, addressing open problems and applying variational techniques.

Findings

Smooth stationary solutions with nonnegative vorticity are radial.

Uniformly-rotating patches with certain angular velocities are radial.

Results resolve open questions on rotating patches and overdetermined fractional Laplacian problems.

Abstract

In this paper, we study the radial symmetry properties of stationary and uniformly-rotating solutions of the 2D Euler and gSQG equations, both in the smooth setting and the patch setting. For the 2D Euler equation, we show that any smooth stationary solution with compactly supported and nonnegative vorticity must be radial, without any assumptions on the connectedness of the support or the level sets. In the patch setting, for the 2D Euler equation we show that every uniformly-rotating patch $D$ with angular velocity $\Omega \leq 0$ or $\Omega\geq \frac{1}{2}$ must be radial, where both bounds are sharp. For the gSQG equation we obtain a similar symmetry result for $\Omega\leq 0$ or $\Omega\geq \Omega_\alpha$ (with the bounds being sharp), under the additional assumption that the patch is simply-connected. These results settle several open questions in [T. Hmidi, J. Evol. Equ., 15(4): 801-816, 2015] and [F. de la Hoz, Z. Hassainia, T. Hmidi, and J. Mateu, Anal. PDE, 9(7):1609-1670, 2016] on uniformly-rotating patches. Along the way, we close a question on overdetermined problems for the fractional Laplacian [R. Choksi, R. Neumayer, and I. Topaloglu, Arxiv preprint arXiv:1810.08304, 2018, Remark 1.4], which may be of independent interest. The main new ideas come from a calculus of variations point of view.