Exponential decay results for compressible viscous flows with vacuum

Abstract: We are concerned with the isentropic compressible Navier-Stokes system in the two-dimensional torus, with rough data and vacuum : the initial velocity is in the Sobolev space H^1 and the initial density is only bounded and nonnegative. Arbitrary regions of vacuum are admissible, and no compatibility condition is required. Under these assumptions and for large enough bulk viscosity, global solutions have been constructed in [7]. The main goal of the paper is to establish that these solutions converge exponentially fast to a constant state, and to specify the convergence rate in terms of the viscosity coefficients. We also prove exponential decay estimates for the solutions to the inhomogeneous incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. This latter result extends to the torus case the paper [9] dedicated to this system in smooth bounded domains.