Large Time Decay Estimates for the Muskat Equation

Abstract

We prove time decay of solutions to the Muskat equation in 2D and in 3D. In \cite{JEMS} and \cite{CCGRPS}, the authors introduce the norms $\|f\|_{s}(t)= \int_{\mathbb{R}^{2}} |\xi|^{s}|\hat{f}(\xi)| \ d\xi$ in order to prove global existence of solutions to the Muskat problem. In this paper, for the 3D Muskat problem, given initial data $f_{0}\in H^{l}(\mathbb{R}^{2})$ for some $l\geq 3$ such that $\|f_{0}\|_{1} < k_{0}$ for a constant $k_{0} \approx 1/5$, we prove uniform in time bounds of $\|f\|_{s}(t)$ for $-d < s < l-1$ and assuming $\|f_{0}\|_{\nu} < \infty$ we prove time decay estimates of the form $\|f\|_{s}(t) \lesssim (1+t)^{-s+\nu}$ for $0 \leq s \leq l-1$ and $-d \leq \nu < s$. These large time decay rates are the same as the optimal rate for the linear Muskat equation. We also prove analogous results in 2D.