Capillarity-driven Stokes flow: the one-phase problem as small viscosity limit

Abstract We consider the quasistationary Stokes flow that describes the motion of a two-dimensional fluid body under the influence of surface tension effects in an unbounded, infinite-bottom geometry. We reformulate the problem as a fully nonlinear parabolic evolution problem for the function that parameterizes the boundary of the fluid with the nonlinearities expressed in terms of singular integrals. We prove well-posedness of the problem in the subcritical Sobolev spaces $$H^s(\mathbb {R})$$ H s ( R ) up to critical regularity, and establish parabolic smoothing properties for the solutions. Moreover, we identify the problem as the singular limit of the two-phase quasistationary Stokes flow when the viscosity of one of the fluids vanishes.