On the breakdown of solutions to the incompressible Euler equations with free surface boundary

Abstract

We prove a continuation critereon for incompressible liquids with free surface boundary. We combine the energy estimates of Christodoulou and Lindblad with an analog of the estimate due to Beale, Kato, and Majda for the gradient of the velocity in terms of the vorticity, and use this to show solution can be continued so long as the second fundamental form and injectivity radius of the free boundary, the vorticity, and one derivative of the velocity on the free boundary remain bounded, assuming that the Taylor sign condition holds.