Steady Contiguous Vortex-Patch Dipole Solutions of the 2D Incompressible Euler Equation

Abstract

We rigorously construct the first steady traveling wave solutions of the 2D incompressible Euler equation that take the form of a contiguous vortex-patch dipole, which can be viewed as the vortex-patch counterpart of the well-known Lamb–Chaplygin dipole. Our construction is based on a novel fixed-point approach that determines the patch boundary as the fixed point of a certain nonlinear map. Smoothness and other properties of the patch boundary are also obtained.