The Hele-Shaw semi-flow

We prove that the Cauchy problem is well-posed in a strong sense and in a general setting. Our main result is the construction of an abstract semi-flow for the Hele-Shaw problem within general fluid domains (enabling, for instance, changes in the topology of the fluid domain) and which satisfies several properties: We provide simple comparison arguments, establish a new stability estimate and derive several consequences, including monotonicity and continuity results for the solutions, along with many Lyapunov functionals. We establish an eventual analytic regularity result for any arbitrary initial data. We also study numerous qualitative properties, including global regularity for initial data in sub-critical Sobolev spaces, well-posedness in a strong sense for initial data with barely a modulus of continuity, as well as waiting-time phenomena for Lipschitz solutions, in any dimension. This revision contains some corrections.