Regularity of Hele-Shaw Flow with source and drift

TL;DR

This paper investigates the regularity of Hele-Shaw flow with source and drift, establishing conditions under which the free boundary is Lipschitz or has higher regularity, depending on the smoothness of the data.

Contribution

It provides new regularity results for Hele-Shaw flow with source and drift, including Lipschitz and $C^{1,eta}$ regularity under specific conditions.

Findings

Lipschitz regularity of free boundary when close to a Lipschitz graph with small Lipschitz constant

Establishment of $C^{1,eta}$ regularity in absence of drift using obstacle problem theory

Proof of non-degeneracy and higher regularity when source and drift are smooth

Abstract

In this paper we study the regularity property of Hele-Shaw flow, where source and drift are present in the evolution. More specifically we consider H\"{o}lder continuous source and Lipschitz continuous drift. We show that if the free boundary of the solution is locally close to a Lipschitz graph, then it is indeed Lipschitz, given that the Lipschitz constant is small. When there is no drift, our result establishes $C^{1,\gamma}$ regularity of the free boundary by combining our result with the obstacle problem theory. In general, when the source and drift are both smooth, we prove that the solution is non-degenerate, indicating higher regularity of the free boudary.