The Peskin Problem with Viscosity Contrast

Abstract

The Peskin problem models the dynamics of a closed elastic filament immersed in an incompressible fluid. In this paper, we consider the case when the inner and outer viscosities are possibly different. This viscosity contrast adds further non-local effects to the system through the implicit non-local relation between the net force and the free interface. We prove the first global well-posedness result for the Peskin problem in this setting. The result applies for medium size initial interfaces in critical spaces and shows instant analytic smoothing. We carefully calculate the medium size constraint on the initial data. These results are new even without viscosity contrast.