On the motion of a small light body immersed in a two dimensional incompressible perfect fluid with vorticity

Abstract

In this paper we consider the motion of a rigid body immersed in a two dimensional unbounded incompressible perfect fluid with vorticity. We prove that when the body shrinks to a massless pointwise particle with fixed circulation, the "fluid+rigid body" system converges to the vortex-wave system introduced by Marchioro and Pulvirenti in [11]. This extends both the paper [2] where the case of a solid tending to a massive pointwise particle was tackled and the paper [3] where the massless case was considered but in a bounded cavity filled with an irrotational fluid.