English

On the sharp critical mass threshold for the 3D Patlak-Keller-Segel-Navier-Stokes system via Couette flow

Analysis of PDEs 2025-06-13 v1

Abstract

As is well-known, the solution of the Patlak-Keller-Segel system in 3D may blow up in finite time regardless of any initial cell mass. In this paper, we are interested in the suppression of blow-up and the critical mass threshold for the 3D Patlak-Keller-Segel-Navier-Stokes system via the Couette flow (Ay,0,0)(Ay, 0, 0). It is proved that if the Couette flow is sufficiently strong (AA is large enough), then the solutions for the system are global in time in the periodic domain (x,y,z)T3(x,y,z)\in\mathbb{T}^{3} as long as the initial cell mass is less than 16π216\pi^{2}. This result seems to be sharp, since the zero-mode function (the mean value in xx-direction) of the three dimensional density is a complication of the two-dimensional Keller-Segel equations, whose critical mass in 2D is 8π8\pi. One new observation is the dissipative decay of (u~2,0,u~3,0)(\widetilde{u}_{2,0},\widetilde{u}_{3,0}) (see Lemma 4.3 for more details), then we combine the quasi-linear method proposed by Wei-Zhang (Comm. Pure Appl. Math., 2021) with the zero-mode estimate of the density by the logarithmic Hardy-Littlewood-Sobolev inequality as Bedrossian-He (SIAM J. Math. Anal., 2017) or He (Nonlinearity, 2025) to obtain the bounded-ness of the density and the velocity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.10578,
  title  = {On the sharp critical mass threshold for the 3D Patlak-Keller-Segel-Navier-Stokes system via Couette flow},
  author = {Shikun Cui and Lili Wang and Wendong Wang and Juncheng Wei},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.10578},
  year   = {2025}
}