English

Global well-posedness of the one-phase Muskat problem with surface tension

Analysis of PDEs 2026-05-11 v3 Fluid Dynamics

Abstract

In this paper, we establish the global well-posedness of the one-phase Muskat problem with surface tension for small initial data. This problem describes the motion of the interface separating a wet region from a dry region within a porous medium, a process governed by Darcy's law. Although physically essential, the inclusion of surface tension introduces an additional challenge. We prove that if the initial free boundary is sufficiently small in HsH^s, s>d/2+1s>d/2+1, then the problem admits a unique global strong solution. Moreover, the solution converges to zero in Lipschitz norm as tt\rightarrow\infty. To the best of our knowledge, this work constitutes the first global well-posedness result for the one-phase Muskat problem with surface tension.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.06545,
  title  = {Global well-posedness of the one-phase Muskat problem with surface tension},
  author = {Hongjie Dong and Hyunwoo Kwon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.06545},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

40 pages; v3. added references and fixed some typo