Nonlinear stability of circular vortex patches

This paper proves that circular vortex patches in the plane are stable for the nonlinear dynamical system generated by the Euler equations of incompressible fluids. This is achieved by establishing a relative variational principle in terms of either energy or angular momentum. Thus, we exploit and extend Arnold's idea in (1965, 1969) to a nonsmooth setting as well.Research partially supported by DOE contract DE-AT03-82ER12097 to the University of California, Berkeley