Hydrodynamic Killing vector fields on surfaces

Abstract

Killing vector fields, which have their origins in Riemannian geometry, have recently garnered attention for their significance in understanding fluid flows on curved surfaces. Owing to the significance of behavior of fluid flows around the boundary and at infinity, in the context of fluid dynamics, Killing vector fields of interest should satisfy the slip boundary condition and be complete vector fields, which are called hydrodynamic Killing vector fields (HKVF) in this paper. Our purpose is to determine surfaces admitting a HKVF. We prove that any connected, orientable surface admitting an HKVF is conformally equivalent to one of the 14 canonical Riemann surfaces, each with either a rotationally or translationally symmetric metric. This paves the way for quantitative investigations of fluid flows associated with Killing vector fields and zonal flows, such as issues of stability and instability, extending its applications potentially to global meteorological phenomena and planetary atmospheric science.