A Very Smooth Ride in a Rough Sea

It has been known for some time that a 3D incompressible Euler flow that has initially a barely smooth velocity field nonetheless has Lagrangian fluid particle trajectories that are analytic in time for at least a finite time Serfati (C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris Série I 320:175–180, 1995), Shnirelman (Glob. Stoch. Anal., http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.5837v1, 2012). Here an elementary derivation is given, based on Cauchy’s form of the Euler equations in Lagrangian coordinates. This form implies simple recurrence relations among the time-Taylor coefficients of the Lagrangian map, used here to derive bounds for the C ^1,γ Hölder norms of the coefficients and infer temporal analyticity of Lagrangian trajectories when the initial velocity is C ^1,γ.