From the free boundary condition for Hele-Shaw to a fractional parabolic equation

Abstract

We propose a method to determine the smoothness of sufficiently flat solutions of one phase Hele-Shaw problems. The novelty is the observation that under a flatness assumption the free boundary --represented by the hodograph transform of the solution- solves a nonlinear integro-differential equation. This nonlinear equation is linearized to a (nonlocal) parabolic equation with bounded measurable coefficients, for which regularity estimates are available. This fact is used to prove a regularity result for the free boundary of a weak solution near points where the solution looks sufficiently flat. More concretely, flat means that in a parabolic neighborhood of the point the solution lies between the solutions corresponding to two parallel flat fronts a small distance apart --a condition that only depends on the the local behavior of the solution. In a neighborhood of such a point, the free boundary is given by the graph of a function whose spatial gradient enjoys a universal H\"older estimate in both space and time.