An inequality for Riesz transforms implying blow-up for some nonlinear and nonlocal transport equations (Q2642041)

The authors prove a new integral inequality for the Riesz transforms in Euclidean space \(\mathbb R^n\), and then by using this inequality show blow-up in finite time for the following problem \[ \partial _t \Theta = R(\Theta) \cdot \nabla \Theta , \qquad \Theta (x,0) = \Theta_0(x), \] where \(\Theta _0 \in H^m(\mathbb R^n)\), \(m > n / 2 + 1\) is non-negative, non-identically zero initial data. More concretely, it is proved that there exists \(T^ * \) depending only on \(\Theta _0 \) such that the norm \(\| {\nabla \Theta ( \cdot ,t)}\| _{L_\infty } \) blows up not later than at time \(T^ * \). The inequality mentioned above has the form \[ -\int_{\mathbb R^n} \frac{(Rf(x) - Rf(0)) \cdot \nabla f(x)}{| x | ^{n + \alpha }}\,dx \geq C_\alpha \int_{\mathbb R^n} \frac{f(x)^2}{| x | ^{n + \alpha + 1}}\,dx, \] where \(Rf(x) = (R_1 f(x),\dots,R_n f(x))\) is the singular integral operator given by \[ R_j f(x) = c_n \text{ P.V. }\int_{\mathbb R^n} f(x - y) \frac{y_j }{| y| ^{n + 1}}\,dy, \] where \(f\) is a suitable smooth function with constant sign vanishing at the origin, \(C_\alpha \) is strictly positive in the range \(0 < \alpha < 1\) and \(c_n \) is taken to normalize properly the Riesz transforms. The one-dimensional case was studied earlier and was applied to obtain finite blow-up for nonlinear transport equation with a nonlocal velocity field, given by the Hilbert transform of the active scalar. The proof of \(n\)-dimensional inequality presented here follows the steps performed in one-dimensional case and uses the Mellin transform, which appears very naturally for a given radial character of the involved weights. However, the \(n\)-dimensional case presents new features which shed light on the one-dimensional case. In particular, it occurs that the inequality holds for \(f\) with or without constant sign as long as its spherical harmonic expansion does not contain terms of degree 1. If \(f\) consists of a sum of radial functions multiplied by spherical harmonics of degree 1 then the inequality is no longer true and the corresponding Mellin multiplier is negative near zero.