\(L^{3,\infty}\) solutions of the liquid crystals system (Q2416373)

The authors prove a regularity result for the simplified system of the original Ericksen-Leslie equations, which account for the three-dimensional incompressible flows of liquid crystal. They consider the system $ u_{t}-\Delta u+u\cdot \nabla u+\nabla p=-\operatorname{div}(\nabla d\odot \nabla d)$, $ \operatorname{div}u=0$, $d_{t}+u\cdot \nabla d-\Delta d=-f(d)$, posed in $\mathbb{R} ^{3}\times (0,T)$, where $u=(u_{1},u_{2},u_{3})$ is the velocity field, $p$ is the scalar pressure, $d=(d_{1},d_{2},d_{3})$ is the optical molecule direction after penalization and $f(d)=\frac{1}{\varepsilon ^{2}}(\left\vert d\right\vert ^{2}-1)d$. Initial conditions are added: $u(x,0)=u_{0}(x)$ with $\operatorname{div}(u_{0})=0$, $d(x,0)=d_{0}(x)$. The authors define the notion of a weak solution for this problem as a triple $(u,p,d)$ with $u\in L^{\infty }(0,T;L^{2}(\mathbb{R}^{3}))\cap L^{2}(0,T;H^{1}(\mathbb{R}^{3}))$, $ d-d_{0}\in L^{\infty }(0,T;H^{1}(\mathbb{R}^{3}))\cap L^{2}(0,T;H^{2}( \mathbb{R}^{3}))$ and which satisfies the problem in the distributional sense. They also define the notion of a suitable weak solution as a triple $ (u,p,d)$ such that the weak solution $(u,d)$ satisfies the problem in the distribution sense, the solution $(u,d)$ satisfies an energy inequality, the pressure $p$ belongs to $L_{\mathrm{loc}}^{\frac{3}{2}}(\mathbb{R}^{3}\times (0,T))$ and the triple $(u,d,p)$ satisfies a modified generalized local energy inequality. The main result of the paper proves that, if $(u,d,p)$ is a suitable weak solution of the problem such that $\left\vert u\right\vert $ and $ \left\vert \nabla d\right\vert$ belong to $L^{3,\infty }(Q)$, then $(u,d)$ is regular in $\overline{Q}(\frac{1}{2})$. Here $Q=\Omega \times (0,T)$ and $ L^{3,\infty }(Q)$ is the space equipped with the norm $\left\Vert u\right\Vert _{L^{3,\infty }(Q)}=\sup_{0\leq t\leq T}\left\Vert u\right\Vert _{L^{3}(\Omega )}$. The authors first prove a scaling property for this problem, a Hölder continuity result, and local regularity results for small suitable solutions to this problem. They also use $L^{p}$ estimates for weak solutions of the non-stationary Stokes problem and local existence and regularity results for solutions of the Navier-Stokes problem.