Viscous fluid fingering on a negatively curved surface.

Viscous fingering formation in flat Hele-Shaw cells is a classical and widely studied fluid mechanical problem. We examine the development of viscous fluid fingering on a two-dimensional surface of constant negative Gaussian curvature, the hyperbolic plane H(2). A perturbative mode-coupling formalism is applied to study the influence of the negative surface curvature on the two most important pattern formation mechanisms of the system: fingertip splitting and finger competition. We also report on a time-dependent control strategy placed on the injection rate, which is able to minimize viscous fingering growth on H(2).