Global regularity of the multi-dimensional compressible Navier-Stokes-Korteweg system

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the 2D and 3D compressible Navier-Stokes-Korteweg system derived by Dunn and Serrin [Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal. 88(2):95-133, 1985], which is widely used to describe compressible fluids with capillarity effects. Specifically, we prove that strong solutions exist globally for arbitrarily large initial data on the periodic torus. One of the key ingredients in the proof lies in establishing a novel critical control relation between the effective velocity and the lower bound of the density, i.e., the upper bound of the effective velocity is controlled by the square root of the logarithm of the reciprocal of the density's lower bound, which plays a crucial role in deriving the lower bound of the density.