Long-time behavior to the 3D isentropic compressible Navier-Stokes equations

TL;DR

This paper investigates the long-time behavior of solutions to the 3D isentropic compressible Navier-Stokes equations, establishing optimal decay rates and demonstrating the persistence of vacuum states under certain conditions.

Contribution

It improves previous decay rate results by removing extra regularity assumptions and extends vacuum persistence results from the torus to the whole space.

Findings

Established optimal decay rates for solutions.

Proved vacuum states persist over time.

Achieved first $L^ abla$-decay rate $(1+t)^{-1}$ for pressure with vacuum.

Abstract

We are concerned with the long-time behavior of classical solutions to the isentropic compressible Navier-Stokes equations in $\mathbb R^3$. Our main results and innovations can be stated as follows: Under the assumption that the density $\rho({\bf{x}}, t)$ verifies $\rho({\bf{x}},0)\geq c>0$ and $\sup_{t\geq 0}\|\rho(\cdot,t)\|_{L^\infty}\leq M$, we establish the optimal decay rates of the solutions. This greatly improves the previous result (Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal. 234 (2019), 1167--1222), where the authors require an extra hypothesis $\sup_{t\geq 0}\|\rho(\cdot,t)\|_{C^\alpha}\leq M$ with $\alpha$ arbitrarily small. We prove that the vacuum state will persist for any time provided that the initial density contains vacuum and the far-field density is away from vacuum, which extends the torus case obtained in (SIAM J. Math. Anal. 55 (2023), 882--899) to the whole space. We derive the decay properties of the solutions with vacuum as far-field density. This in particular gives the first result concerning the $L^\infty$-decay with a rate $(1+t)^{-1}$ for the pressure to the 3D compressible Navier-Stokes equations in the presence of vacuum. The main ingredient of the proof relies on the techniques involving blow-up criterion, a key time-independent positive upper and lower bounds of the density, and a regularity interpolation trick.