The $N$-dimensional gravity driven Muskat problem

Abstract

We study the Muskat problem, which describes the motion of two immiscible, incompressible fluids in a homogeneous porous medium occupying the full space ${\mathbb{R}^{N+1}}$, $N \geq 2$, driven by gravity. The interface between the fluids is given as graph of a function over $\mathbb{R}^N$. The problem is reformulated as a nonlinear, nonlocal evolution problem for this function, involving singular integrals arising from potential representations of the velocity and pressure fields. Using results from harmonic analysis, we demonstrate that the evolution is of parabolic type in the open set identified by the Rayleigh-Taylor condition. We use the abstract theory of such problems to establish that the Muskat problem defines a semiflow on this set in all subcritical Sobolev spaces $H^s(\mathbb{R}^N)$, $s>s_c$, where ${s_c=1+N/2}$ is the critical exponent. We additionally obtain parabolic smoothing up to ${\rm C}^\infty$.