Rough sound waves in $3D$ compressible Euler flow with vorticity

TL;DR

This paper establishes optimal regularity conditions for solutions to the 3D compressible Euler equations with vorticity, using a novel geometric formulation that separates sound waves from transport phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces a new geometric formulation of the Euler equations that decomposes the flow into wave and transport parts, enabling sharp regularity and existence results.

Findings

Optimal regularity conditions for shock formation.

Sharp estimates for acoustic geometry and sound cones.

Strichartz and Schauder estimates for coupled wave and transport equations.

Abstract

We prove a series of results tied to the regularity and geometry of solutions to the $3D$ compressible Euler equations with vorticity and entropy. Our framework exploits and reveals additional virtues of a recent new formulation of the equations, which decomposed the flow into a geometric "(sound) wave-part" coupled to a "transport-div-curl-part" (transport-part for short), with both parts exhibiting remarkable properties. Our main result is that the time of existence can be controlled in terms of the $H^{2^+}(\mathbb{R}^3)$-norm of the wave-part of the initial data and various Sobolev and H\"{o}lder norms of the transport-part of the initial data, the latter comprising the initial vorticity and entropy. The wave-part regularity assumptions are optimal in the scale of Sobolev spaces: shocks can instantly form if one only assumes a bound for the $H^2(\mathbb{R}^3)$-norm of the wave-part of the initial data. Our proof relies on the assumption that the transport-part of the initial data is more regular than the wave-part, and we show that the additional regularity is propagated by the flow, even though the transport-part of the flow is deeply coupled to the rougher wave-part. To implement our approach, we derive several results of independent interest: i) sharp estimates for the acoustic geometry, i.e., the geometry of sound cones; ii) Strichartz estimates for quasilinear sound waves coupled to vorticity and entropy; and iii) Schauder estimates for the transport-div-curl-part. Compared to previous works on low regularity, the main new features of the paper are that the quasilinear PDE systems under study exhibit multiple speeds of propagation and that elliptic estimates for various components of the fluid are needed, both to avoid loss of regularity and to gain space-time integrability.