We consider the Muskat problem with surface tension for one fluid or two fluids, with or without viscosity jump, with infinite depth or Lipschitz rigid boundaries, and in arbitrary dimension $d$ of the interface. The problem is nonlocal, quasilinear, and to leading order, is scaling invariant in the Sobolev space $H^{ s_c}(\mathbb{ R}^d)$ with $s_c=1+\frac d2$. We prove local well-posedness for large data in all subcritical Sobolev spaces $H^s(\mathbb{ R}^d)$, $s>s_c$, allowing for initial interfaces whose curvatures are unbounded and, furthermore when $d=1$, not square integrable. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large-data well-posedness result that covers all subcritical Sobolve spaces for the Muskat problem with surface tension. We reformulate the problem in terms of the Dirichlet-Neumann operator and use a paradifferential approach to reduce the problem to an explicit parabolic equation, which is of independent interest.
Categories: math.AP