Steady double vortex patches with opposite signs in a planar ideal fluid

Abstract

In this paper we consider steady vortex flows for the incompressible Euler equations in a planar bounded domain. By solving a variational problem for the vorticity, we construct steady double vortex patches with opposite signs concentrating at a strict local minimum point of the Kirchhoff-Routh function with $k=2$. Moreover, we show that such steady solutions are in fact local maximizers of the kinetic energy among isovortical patches, which correlates stability to uniqueness.