On classical solutions for viscous polytropic fluids with degenerate viscosities and vacuum

In this paper, we consider the three-dimensional isentropic Navier-Stokes equations for compressible fluids with viscosities depending on density in a power law and allowing initial vacuum. We introduce the notion of regular solutions and prove the local-in-time well-posedness of solutions with arbitrarily large initial data and vacuum in this class, which is a long-standing open problem due to the very high degeneracy caused by vacuum. Moreover, for certain classes of initial data with local vacuum, we show that the regular solution that we obtained will break down in finite time, no matter how small and smooth the initial data are.