Global well-posedness for the 2D Muskat problem

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Stephen Cameron, University of Chicago
Fine Hall 322

The Muskat problem was originally introduced by Muskat in order to model the interface between water and oil in tar sands. In general, it describes the interface between two incompressible, immiscible fluids of different constant densities in a porous media. In this talk I will prove the existence of global, smooth solutions to the 2D Muskat problem in the stable regime whenever the initial data is monotonic or has slope strictly less than 1. The curvature of these solutions solutions decays to 0 as $t$ goes to infinity, and they are unique when the initial data is $C^{1,\epsilon}$. We do this by constructing a modulus of continuity generated by the equation, just as Kiselev, Naverov, and Volberg did in their proof of the global well-posedness for the quasi-geostraphic equation.