Helical vortex filaments with compactly supported cross-sectional vorticity for the incompressible Euler equations in $\mathbb{R}^3$

Abstract

We revisit the vortex filament conjecture for three-dimensional inviscid and incompressible Euler flows with helical symmetry and no swirl. Using gluing arguments, we provide the first construction of a smooth helical vortex filament in the whole space $\mathbb{R}^3$ whose cross-sectional vorticity is compactly supported in $\mathbb{R}^2$ for all times. The construction extends to a multi-vortex solution comprising several helical filaments arranged along a regular polygon. Our approach yields fine asymptotics for the vorticity cores, thus improving related variational results for smooth solutions in bounded helical domains and infinite pipes, as well as non-smooth vortex patches in the whole space.