The large class of moving boundary processes in the plane modeled by the so-called Laplacian growth, which describes, e.g., solidification, electrodeposition, viscous fingering, bacterial growth, etc., is known to be integrable and to exhibit a large
number of exact solutions. In this work, the boundaries are assumed to be in the class of lemniscates with all zeros inside the bounded component of the complex plane. We prove that for any initial boundary taken from this class, the evolving boundary instantly stops being in the class, or else Laplacian growth destroys lemniscates instantly.
A new class of solutions to Laplacian growth with zero surface tension is presented and shown to contain all other known solutions as special or limiting cases. These solutions, which are time-dependent conformal maps with branch cuts inside the unit
circle, are governed by a nonlinear integral equation and describe oil fjords with non-parallel walls in viscous fingering experiments in Hele-Shaw cells. Integrals of motion for the multi-cut Laplacian growth solutions in terms of singularities of the Schwarz function are found, and the dynamics of densities (jumps) on the cuts are derived. The subclass of these solutions with linear Cauchy densities on the cuts of the Schwarz function is of particular interest, because in this case the integral equation for the conformal map becomes linear. These solutions can also be of physical importance by representing oil/air interfaces, which form oil fjords with a constant opening angle, in accordance with recent experiments in a Hele-shaw cell.
We consider Laplacian Growth of self-similar domains in different geometries. Self-similarity determines the analytic structure of the Schwarz function of the moving boundary. The knowledge of this analytic structure allows us to derive the integral
equation for the conformal map. It is shown that solutions to the integral equation obey also a second order differential equation which is the one dimensional Schroedinger equation with the sinh inverse square potential. The solutions, which are expressed through the Gauss hypergeometric function, characterize the geometry of self-similar patterns in a wedge. We also find the potential for the Coulomb gas representation of the self-similar Laplacian growth in a wedge and calculate the corresponding free energy.
The Laplacian growth (the Hele-Shaw problem) of multi-connected domains in the case of zero surface tension is proven to be equivalent to an integrable systems of Whitham equations known in soliton theory. The Whitham equations describe slowly modula
ted periodic solutions of integrable hierarchies of nonlinear differential equations. Through this connection the Laplacian growth is understood as a flow in the moduli space of Riemann surfaces.
