Steady-state fingering patterns for a periodic Muskat problem (Q376096)

The Muskat problem describes the evolution of the interface between to immiscible fluids in a porous medium. The aim of this paper is the study of global bifurcation branches consisting of stationary solutions of the Muskat problem. The authors show that, for stationary solutions, the problem can be reduced to an ODE with an additional non-local constraint. The proof of this result is based on the study of odd solutions and on the one-to-one correspondence between the odd and the even solutions. It is also proved that there exist infinitely many global bifurcation branches consisting of odd solutions. The behavior of the steady fingers away from the set of trivial solutions is also investigated. The steady-state fingering patterns correspond to certain solutions of the mathematical pendulum.