English

Bifurcation of Tetrahedral Non-Zonal Flows in the 2D Euler Equations on a Rotating Sphere

Analysis of PDEs 2026-04-14 v1

Abstract

We investigate the emergence of finite-amplitude non-zonal flows on the sphere S2\mathbb{S}^2 arising from stationary solutions to the 2D Euler equations. By restricting the Laplace-Beltrami eigenspace to the invariant subspace of the tetrahedral symmetry group T\mathbf{T}, we bypass the (2l+1)(2l+1)-dimensional kernel degeneracy, obtaining a scalar Liapunov-Schmidt reduction. We analyze four distinct physical non-linearities: a polynomial model, the sine-Gordon and sinh-Gordon models, and the exponential (Liouville) model. We explicitly derive the bifurcation parameter via spectral projections, proving that the bifurcation topology (subcritical or supercritical) is not a geometric invariant, but is governed by the parity of the nonlinearity and the mass conservation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.10092,
  title  = {Bifurcation of Tetrahedral Non-Zonal Flows in the 2D Euler Equations on a Rotating Sphere},
  author = {Yuri Cacchiò},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.10092},
  year   = {2026}
}