Global existence for the confined muskat problem

Abstract

In this paper we show global existence of the Lipschitz continuous solution for the stable Muskat problem with finite depth (confined) and initial data satisfying some smallness conditions relating the amplitude, the slope, and the depth. The cornerstone of the argument is that, for these small initial data, both the amplitude and the slope remain uniformly bounded for all positive times. We notice that, for some of these solutions, the slope can grow but it remains bounded. This is very different from the infinite deep case, where the slope of the solutions satisfy a maximum principle. Our work generalizes a previous result where the depth is infinite.