Global well-posedness of the 2D nonhomogeneous incompressible nematic liquid crystal flows (Q324126)

The authors consider a system which describes the flow in the whole space \( \mathbb{R}^{2}\) of a nonhomogeneous incompressible nematic liquid crystal, with vacuum as far field density. They start with the problem \(\rho _{t}+ \operatorname{div}(\rho u)=0\), \(\rho u_{t}+\rho u\cdot \nabla u-\nu \Delta u+\nabla P=-\lambda \operatorname{div}(\nabla d\odot \nabla d)=0\), \(d_{t}+(u\cdot \nabla )d=\gamma (\Delta d+|\nabla d|^{2}d)\), \(\operatorname{div}u=0\), \(|d|=1\), posed in \( \mathbb{R}^{2}\times (0,+\infty )\), where \(\rho \) is the density, \(u\) the velocity, \(P\) the pressure and \(d\) the unknown (averaged) macroscopic/continuum molecule orientation of the nematic liquid crystal flow. The initial conditions \(\rho (x,0)=\rho _{0}(x)\), \(u(x,0)=u_{0}(x)\), \( d(x,0)=d_{0}(x)\) are imposed in \(\mathbb{R}^{2}\) for given \(\rho _{0}\), \( u_{0}\) and \(d_{0}\), with \(|d_{0}(x)|=1\). The authors first define the notion of strong solution to this coupled system in \(\mathbb{R}^{2}\times (0,T)\) if all derivatives of (\(\rho ,u,P,d\)) involved in this system are regular distributions and if the equations of the system hold almost everywhere in \( \mathbb{R}^{2}\times (0,T)\). Assuming different hypotheses on the data of the problem and especially that the initial data density and the gradient of orientation do not decay too slowly at infinity and that the initial orientation satisfies a geometric condition, the authors prove the existence of a unique global-in-time strong solution and they describe its large time behavior. The authors point out that the initial data can be arbitrarily large and the initial density may contain vacuum states. For the proof, the authors quote from the literature tools which allow proving the existence of a small \(T_{0}>0\) such that the above problem has a unique strong solution in \(\mathbb{R}^{2}\times (0,T_{0})\). They then prove global a priori estimates on the strong solution of the above system in suitable higher norms, through detailed computations and using properties of Hardy and BMO spaces.