Global well-posedness of the Euler-Korteweg system for small irrotational data (Q521141)

The subject of the paper under review is the compressible Euler-Korteweg system. This system can be seen as a generalization of the standard compressible Euler equations, because of the presence of the so-called Korteweg tensor, which is intended to take into account capillary effects and models, in particular the behavior at the interfaces of a liquid-vapor mixture. This system appears in different frameworks, for instance for a special choice of the tensor one can recover formally the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. Also, in the irrotational case (i.e. the initial velocity is irrotational), the system can be reformulated as a quasilinear Schrödinger equation. The main contribution of the authors in this paper is the proof of the global well-posedness and asymptotically linear behavior of small smooth solutions near the constant sate \((\rho,u)=(\overline\rho,0)\), where \(\rho\) and \(u\) stand for the fluid density and velocity field respectively. This seems to be the first global well-posedness result for the Euler-Korteweg system in the case of a general pressure and capillary coefficient. The proofs are different in dimensions 3 and 4 and when it is greater than 4 and beside standard techniques the authors rely on some singular multiplier estimates.