On Singular Vortex Patches, I: Well-posedness Issues

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to discuss the well-posedness theory of singular vortex patches. Our main results are of two types: well-posedness and ill-posedness. On the well-posedness side, we show that globally $m-$fold symmetric vortex patches with corners emanating from the origin are globally well-posed in natural regularity classes as long as $m\geq 3$. In this case, all of the angles involved solve a \emph{closed} ODE system which dictates the global-in-time dynamics of the corners and only depends on the initial locations and sizes of the corners. {Along the way we obtain a global well-posedness result for a class of symmetric patches with boundary singular at the origin, which includes logarithmic spirals.} On the ill-posedness side, we show that \emph{any} other type of corner singularity in a vortex patch cannot evolve continuously in time except possibly when all corners involved have precisely the angle $\frac{\pi}{2}$ for all time. Even in the case of vortex patches with corners of angle $\frac{\pi}{2}$ or with corners which are only locally $m-$fold symmetric, we prove that they are generically ill-posed. We expect that in these cases of ill-posedness, the vortex patches actually cusp immediately in a self-similar way and we derive some asymptotic models which may be useful in giving a more precise description of the dynamics. In a companion work, we discuss the long-time behavior of symmetric vortex patches with corners and use them to construct patches on $\mathbb{R}^2$ with interesting dynamical behavior such as cusping and spiral formation in infinite time.