On the evolution of nearly circular vortex patches

Recently, the classical problem of the evolution of patches of constant vorticity was reformulated as an evolution equation for the boundary of the patch. We study this equation in the neighborhood of the circular vortex patch and introduce a hierarchy of area-preserving nonlinear approximate equations. The first of these equations is shown to have a rich rigid structure: it possesses an exhaustive increasing sequence of linear invariant manifolds of arbitrarily large finite dimensions. On each of these manifolds the equation can be written as an explicit finite system of ordinary differential equations. Solutions of these ODEs, starting from arbitrarily small neighborhoods of the circular vortex patch, are shown to blow up.