Blow-up suppression for the 2D parabolic-parabolic Patlak-Keller-Segel-Navier-Stokes system

Abstract

Chemotactic aggregation can overcome diffusion and lead to finite-time blow-up in Patlak-Keller-Segel models. Mixing induced by suitable fluid flows can counteract this aggregation through enhanced dissipation. Earlier results of Zeng-Zhang-Zi (J. Funct. Anal., 2021) for the coupled system impose additional smallness assumptions on the initial chemical gradient. A natural question is whether this restriction can be removed for the coupled system near a stationary Couette flow. We give a positive answer to this question for the two-dimensional parabolic-parabolic Patlak-Keller-Segel-Navier-Stokes system near the Couette flow $(Ay,0)$ in $\mathbb T\times\mathbb R$. It is proved that, when the Couette flow is strong enough ($A$ is large enough), the system admits a global solution that remains uniformly bounded in time for arbitrary fixed initial data. The main difficulties are the transient growth of the chemical gradient and the nonlinear coupling among the density, chemical field and fluid. We develop a two-stage energy method combining short-time estimates in Kelvin coordinates with long-time estimates in physical coordinates. The key is to split the nonzero chemical modes into two parts while accounting for the nonlinear transport. One part carries the initial data, and the other is a forced component with zero initial data. A weighted coupled energy controls the former through a time-integrable Gronwall coefficient and absorbs the feedback from the latter without increasing the initial energy. Enhanced dissipation then provides the bounds needed to enter the long-time regime, while one-dimensional zero-mode estimates and Moser iteration complete the argument without a mass restriction.