Stream lines, quasilines and holomorphic motions (Q289640)

The author gives a new application of the theory of holomorphic motions to study the geometry of level lines of harmonic functions and stream lines of ideal planar fluids, and establish bounds on their distortion in terms of a reference line. When the reference line is a quasiline, it follows that all level lines are quasilines. For simplicity, let \(\Omega \subset \mathbb{C}\) be a Jordan domain, and \(\rho_\Omega\) the hyperbolic metric on \(\Omega\). A hyperbolic line \(\gamma \subset \Omega\) is a complete hyperbolic geodesic. For \(c\geq 0\), an arc \(\alpha \subset \Omega\) is a \(c\)-level line of \(\gamma\) if \(\rho(z,\gamma)=c\) for all \(z\in \alpha\). The first theorem states that the level lines are the images of the line \(\gamma\) under a self mapping of the domain with bounded distortion \(K\leq e^c\). This is proved with the help of a holomorphic motion of \(\Omega\) which is a map \(\Phi: \mathcal{S}\times \Omega \to \mathbb{C}\) such that the map \(\lambda \mapsto \Phi(\lambda, a)\) is holomorphic for any fixed \(a\in \Omega\), the map \(a\mapsto \Phi(\lambda,a)\) is one-to-one for any fixed \(\lambda \in \mathcal{S}\) and \(\Phi(0,a)=a\) for all \(a\in \Omega\). Here \(\mathcal{S}=\{z\in \mathbb{C} \mid |\text{Im}(z)|<\frac{\pi}{2}\}\) is the strip. The second theorem concerns the level lines of a harmonic function on \(\Omega\) and says that any level line is an image of an other level line under a quasiconformal mapping with an explicit distortion estimate. Thus if one level line is a quasi-arc, all level lines are quasi-arcs. As an application the author studies stream lines of the fluid flow in a channel, and proves that every stream line is the bounded geometric image of the central line. Thus if the channel is, for instance, symmetric about the real line, then the central line is the real line and it follows that the stream lines are quasilines. At the end of the paper the author considers also the flow around an obstacle and shows that also in this case the stream lines are quasilines.