English

Dynamics and leapfrogging phenomena of multiple helical vortices for 3D incompressible Euler equations

Analysis of PDEs 2025-07-14 v4

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the time evolution of helical vortices without swirl for the incompressible Euler equations in R3\mathbb R^3 under general initial assumptions. Assume the initial helical vorticity is sharply concentrated in NN distinct \ep\ep-neighborhoods, whose mutual distances vanish as O(1/ln\ep)O(1/|\ln \ep|), and each vortex core possesses vorticity mass of order 1/ln\ep1+b1/|\ln \ep|^{1+b} for an arbitrary fixed bRb\in\mathbb R. We prove that as \ep0\ep\to 0, the motion of these helical vortices converges uniformly to a dynamical system derived herein over a time interval of order 1/lnε1b1/|\ln\varepsilon|^{1-b}. In the particular case b=1b=-1, our results establish the evolution counterpart for interacting vortex helices constructed in [I. Guerra, M. Musso, Ann. Inst. H. Poincar\'e C Anal. Non Lin\'aire, 2025]. Notably, for two interacting helical vortices with initial mutual distance ρ0/ln\ep \rho_0/|\ln \ep|, by choosing ρ0\rho_0 sufficiently small, our analysis extends to timescales covering multiple periods. This result provides the first mathematical justification for the numerically observed phenomenon termed ``leapfrogging of Kelvin waves" reported in [N. Hietala et al., Phys. Rev. Fluids, 2016].

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.12240,
  title  = {Dynamics and leapfrogging phenomena of multiple helical vortices for 3D incompressible Euler equations},
  author = {Daomin Cao and Junhong Fan and Guolin Qin and Jie Wan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.12240},
  year   = {2025}
}