Illposedness of $C^{2}$ vortex patches

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that vortex patches with $C^{2}$ regularity are ill-posed by showing that their boundary curvature can become unbounded immediately, contrasting with well-posedness in lower regularity classes.

Contribution

It proves the ill-posedness of $C^{2}$ vortex patches and constructs initial data where boundary curvature becomes unbounded instantly.

Findings

Curvature of $C^{2}$ vortex patches can blow up immediately.

Persistence of $W^{2,p}$ regularity for vortex patches with $1<p< finity$.

Evolution of curvature is governed by a linear, dispersive equation.

Abstract

It is well known that vortex patches are wellposed in $C^{1,\alpha}$ if $0<\alpha <1$. In this paper, we prove the illposedness of $C^{2}$ vortex patches. The setup is to consider the vortex patches in Sobolev spaces $W^{2,p}$ where the curvature of the boundary is $L^p$ integrable. In this setting, we show the persistence of $W^{2,p}$ regularity when $1<p <\infty$ and construct $C^{2}$ initial patch data for which the curvature of the patch boundary becomes unbounded immediately for $t>0$. The key ingredient is the evolution equation for the curvature, the dominant term in which turns out to be linear and dispersive.