Potential flows away from stagnation in infinite cylinders

Abstract: Steady incompressible potential flows of an inviscid or viscous fluid are considered in infinite N-dimensional cylinders with tangential boundary conditions. We show that such flows, if away from stagnation, are constant and parallel to the direction of the cylinder. This means equivalently that a harmonic function whose gradient is bounded away from zero in an infinite cylinder with Neumann boundary conditions is an affine function. The proof of this rigidity result uses a combination of ODE and PDE arguments, respectively for the streamlines of the flow and the harmonic potential function.