On Leonardo da Vinci's paradox

Abstract

Buoyancy points straight upward, yet in the absence of external forces, a rising air bubble may trace a spiral through the water. This phenomenon was already observed by Leonardo da Vinci. We show that the gravity-free, three-dimensional two-phase incompressible Euler equations with surface tension already admit such a motion. For every nonnegative inner-to-outer density ratio and every sufficiently small positive axial Weber number, we construct smooth near-spherical bubbles and drops with compact interfaces and phasewise irrotational flow. They are stationary in a frame translating along and rotating about a fixed axis, while their centroids lie off that axis and therefore trace genuine circular helices in laboratory coordinates. These helical relative equilibria form a symmetry-breaking branch that issues from the axisymmetric family of rectilinearly translating solutions and is generated by the spherical harmonic mode of degree two and azimuthal number one. The mathematical construction exploits an overdetermined free-boundary formulation, its variational structure, and an $\mathrm{SO}(2)$-equivariant Lyapunov-Schmidt reduction. Particular difficulties in the form of resonances arise at a discrete set of density ratios, including the frequently studied vacuum case with vanishing inner density. Complementary to our existence result, in the absence of surface tension and if the inner density is not larger than the outer density we prove that the model admits neither nontrivial translating relative equilibria nor relative equilibria with helical centroid trajectories. As a byproduct, we show that every regular finite-energy stationary vortex sheet of spherical topology for the homogeneous three-dimensional Euler equations, with irrotational flow on both sides, is trivial.