We analyze the decay and instant regularization properties of the evolution semigroups generated by two-dimensional drift-diffusion equations in which the scalar is advected by a shear flow and dissipated by full or partial diffusion. We consider both the space-periodic $\mathbb{T}^2$ setting and the case of a bounded channel $\mathbb{T}\times [0,1]$ with no-flux boundary conditions. In the infinite Péclet number limit (diffusivity $ν\to 0$), our work quantifies the enhanced dissipation effect due to the shear. We also obtain hypoelliptic regularization, showing that solutions are instantly Gevrey regular even with only partial diffusion. The proofs rely on localized spectral gap inequalities and ideas from hypocoercivity with an augmented energy functional with weights replaced by pseudo-differential operators (of a rather simple form). As an application, we study small noise inviscid limits of invariant measures of stochastic perturbations of passive scalars, and show that the classical Freidlin scaling between noise and diffusion can be modified. In particular, although statistically stationary solutions blow up in $H^1$ in the limit $ν\to0$, we show that viscous invariant measures still converge to a unique inviscid measure.
Bedrossian and Masmoudi (2015) showed nonlinear stability of 2D inviscid parallel shear flows in the infinite stripe $(\mathbb{R}/2\mathbb{Z})\times\mathbb{R}$. Inspired by their result, combining a diffeomorphism group result by Misiołek (1993), in this paper we give a lower bound of perturbations in 2D inviscid shear flow in a periodic box.
We consider the passive scalar equations subject to shear flow advection and fractional dissipation. The enhanced dissipation estimates are derived. For classical passive scalar equation ($γ=1$), our result agrees with the sharp one obtained in \cite{Wei18}
We examine the phenomenon of enhanced dissipation from the perspective of Hörmander's classical theory of second order hypoelliptic operators [31]. Consider a passive scalar in a shear flow, whose evolution is described by the advection-diffusion equation \[ \partial_t f + b(y) \partial_x f - νΔf = 0 \text{ on } \mathbb{T} \times (0,1) \times \mathbb{R}_+ \] with periodic, Dirichlet, or Neumann conditions in $y$. We demonstrate that decay is enhanced on the timescale $T \sim ν^{-(N+1)/(N+3)}$, where $N-1$ is the maximal order of vanishing of the derivative $b'(y)$ of the shear profile and $N=0…
We investigate the linear stability of shears near the Couette flow for a class of 2D incompressible stably stratified fluids. Our main result consists of nearly optimal decay rates for perturbations of stationary states whose velocities are monotone shear flows $(U(y),0)$ and have an exponential density profile. In the case of the Couette flow $U(y)=y$, we recover the rates predicted by Hartman in 1975, by adopting an explicit point-wise approach in frequency space. As a by-product, this implies optimal decay rates as well as Lyapunov instability in $L^2$ for the vorticity. For the previously…
We investigate the long-time properties of the two-dimensional inviscid Boussinesq equations near a stably stratified Couette flow, for an initial Gevrey perturbation of size $\varepsilon$. Under the classical Miles-Howard stability condition on the Richardson number, we prove that the system experiences a shear-buoyancy instability: the density variation and velocity undergo an $O(t^{-1/2})$ inviscid damping while the vorticity and density gradient grow as $O(t^{1/2})$. The result holds at least until the natural, nonlinear timescale $t \approx \varepsilon^{-2}$. Notice that the density behav…
We give an elementary proof of sharp decay rates and the linear inviscid damping near monotone shear flow in a periodic channel, first obtained in [14]. We shall also obtain the precise asymptotics of the solutions, measured in the space $L^{\infty}$.
The classical plane Couette flow, plane Poiseuille flow, and pipe Poiseuille flow share some universal 3D steady coherent structure in the form of "streak-roll-critical layer". As the Reynolds number approaches infinity, the steady coherent structure approaches a 3D limiting shear of the form ($U(y,z), 0, 0$) in velocity variables. All such 3D shears are steady states of the 3D Euler equations. This raises the importance of investigating the stability of such inviscid 3D shears in contrast to the classical Rayleigh theory of inviscid 2D shears. Several general criteria of stability for such in…
In this paper, we prove the decay estimates of the velocity and $H^1$ scattering for the 2D linearized Euler equations around a class of monotone shear flow in a finite channel. Our result is consistent with the decay rate predicted by Case in 1960.
In this note we establish a density result for certain stationary shear flows, $μ(y)$, that vanish at the boundaries of a horizontal channel. We construct stationary solutions to 2D Navier-Stokes that are $ε$-close in $L^\infty$ to the given shear flow. Our construction is based on a coercivity estimate for the Rayleigh operator, $R[v]$, which is based on a decomposition made possible by the vanishing of $μ$ at the boundaries.
In this article, we prove linear stability, scattering and inviscid damping with optimal decay rates for the linearized 2D Euler equations around a large class of strictly monotone shear flows, $(U(y),0)$, in a periodic channel under Sobolev perturbations. Here, we consider the settings of both an infinite periodic channel of period $L$, $\mathbb{T}_{L}\times \mathbb{R}$, as well as a finite periodic channel, $\mathbb{T}_{L} \times [0,1]$, with impermeable walls. The latter setting is shown to not only be technically more challenging, but to exhibit qualitatively different behavior due to boun…
In a previous article, \cite{Zill3}, we have established linear inviscid damping for a large class of monotone shear flows in a finite periodic channel and have further shown that boundary effects asymptotically lead to the formation of singularities of derivatives of the solution. As the main results of this article, we provide a detailed description of the singularity formation and establish stability in all sub-critical fractional Sobolev spaces and blow-up in all super-critical spaces. Furthermore, we discuss the implications of the blow-up to the problem of nonlinear inviscid damping in a…
We prove nonlinear asymptotic stability of a large class of monotonic shear flows among solutions of the 2D Euler equations in the channel $\mathbb{T}\times[0,1]$. More precisely, we consider shear flows $(b(y),0)$ given by a function $b$ which is Gevrey smooth, strictly increasing, and linear outside a compact subset of the interval $(0,1)$ (to avoid boundary contributions which are incompatible with inviscid damping). We also assume that the associated linearized operator satisfies a suitable spectral condition, which is needed to prove linear inviscid damping. Under these assumptions, we sh…
In this paper, we prove the linear damping for the 2-D Euler equations around a class of shear flows under the assumption that the linearized operator has no embedding eigenvalues. For the symmetric flows, we obtain the explicit decay estimates of the velocity, which is the same as one for monotone shear flows. We confirm a new dynamical phenomena found by Bouchet and Morita: the depletion of the vorticity at the stationary streamlines, which could be viewed as a new mechanism leading to the damping for the base flows with stationary streamlines.
We prove asymptotic stability of shear flows close to the planar Couette flow in the 2D inviscid Euler equations on $\Torus \times \Real$. That is, given an initial perturbation of the Couette flow small in a suitable regularity class, specifically Gevrey space of class smaller than 2, the velocity converges strongly in L^2 to a shear flow which is also close to the Couette flow. The vorticity is asymptotically driven to small scales by a linear evolution and weakly converges as $t \rightarrow \pm\infty$. The strong convergence of the velocity field is sometimes referred to as inviscid damping…
First, we consider Kolmogorov flow (a shear flow with a sinusoidal velocity profile) for 2D Navier-Stokes equation on a torus. Such flows, also called bar states, have been numerically observed as one type of metastable states in the study of 2D turbulence. For both rectangular and square tori, we prove that the non-shear part of perturbations near Kolmogorov flow decays in a time scale much shorter than the viscous time scale. The results are obtained for both the linearized NS equations with any initial vorticity in L^2, and the nonlinear NS equation with initial L^2 norm of vorticity of the…
We prove linear inviscid damping near a general class of monotone shear flows in a finite channel, in Gevrey spaces. It is an essential step towards proving nonlinear inviscid damping for general shear flows that are not close to the Couette flow, which is a major open problem in 2d Euler equations.
Consider inviscid fluids in a channel {-1<y<1}. For the Couette flow v_0=(y,0), the vertical velocity of solutions to the linearized Euler equation at v_0 decays in time. At the nonlinear level, such inviscid damping has not been proved. First, we show that in any (vorticity) H^{s}(s<(3/2)) neighborhood of Couette flow, there exist non-parallel steady flows with arbitrary minimal horizontal period. This implies that nonlinear inviscid damping is not true in any (vorticity) H^{s}(s<(3/2)) neighborhood of Couette flow and for any horizontal period. Indeed, the long time behavior in such neighbor…
In this paper, we study the linear inviscid damping for the linearized $β$-plane equation around shear flows. We develop a new method to give the explicit decay rate of the velocity for a class of monotone shear flows. This method is based on the space-time estimate and the vector field method in sprit of the wave equation. For general shear flows including the Sinus flow, we also prove the linear damping by establishing the limiting absorption principle, which is based on the compactness method introduced by Wei-Zhang-Zhao in \cite{WZZ2}. The main difficulty is that the Rayleigh-Kuo equation …
We study the large time behavior of solutions to two-dimensional Euler and Navier-Stokes equations linearized about shear flows of the mixing layer type in the unbounded channel $\mathbb{T} \times \mathbb{R}$. Under a simple spectral stability assumption on a self-adjoint operator, we prove a local form of the linear inviscid damping that is uniform with respect to small viscosity. We also prove a local form of the enhanced viscous dissipation that takes place at times of order $ν^{-1/3}$, $ν$ being the small viscosity. To prove these results, we use a Hamiltonian approach, following the conju…
We study the inviscid damping of Couette flow with an exponentially stratified density. The optimal decay rates of the velocity field and the density are obtained for general perturbations with minimal regularity. For Boussinesq approximation model, the decay rates we get are consistent with the previous results in the literature. We also study the decay rates for the full Euler equations of stratified fluids, which were not studied before. For both models, the decay rates depend on the Richardson number in a very similar way. Besides, we also study the dispersive decay due to the exponential …
We consider the linearized Euler equations around a smooth, bilipschitz shear profile $U(y)$ on $\mathbb{T}_L \times \mathbb{R}$. We construct an explicit flow which exhibits linear inviscid damping for $L$ sufficiently small, but for which damping fails if $L$ is large. In particular, similar to the instability results for convex profiles for a shear flow being bilipschitz is not sufficient for linear inviscid damping to hold. Instead of an eigenvalue-based argument the underlying mechanism here is shown to be based on a new cascade of resonances moving to higher and higher frequencies in $y$…
We prove the existence of steady \emph{space quasi-periodic} stream functions, solutions for the Euler equation in vorticity-stream function formulation in the two dimensional channel ${\mathbb R}\times [-1,1]$. These solutions bifurcate from a prescribed shear equilibrium near the Couette flow, whose profile induces finitely many modes of oscillations in the horizontal direction for the linearized problem. Using a Nash-Moser implicit function iterative scheme, near such equilibrium we construct small amplitude, space reversible stream functions slightly deforming the linear solutions and reta…
This article addresses mixing and diffusion properties of passive scalars advected by rough ($C^α$) shear flows. We show that in general, one cannot expect a rough shear flow to increase the rate of inviscid mixing to more than that of a smooth shear without critical points. On the other hand, diffusion may be enhanced at a much faster rate. This shows that in the setting of low regularity, the interplay between inviscid mixing properties and enhanced dissipation is more intricate, and in fact contradicts some of the natural heuristics that are valid in the smooth setting.
In this work we study the long time, inviscid limit of the 2D Navier-Stokes equations near the periodic Couette flow, and in particular, we confirm at the nonlinear level the qualitative behavior predicted by Kelvin's 1887 linear analysis. At high Reynolds number Re, we prove that the solution behaves qualitatively like 2D Euler for times t \lesssim Re^(1/3), and in particular exhibits inviscid damping (e.g. the vorticity weakly approaches a shear flow). For times t \gtrsim Re^(1/3), which is sooner than the natural dissipative time scale O(Re), the viscosity becomes dominant and the streamwis…
A semi-explicit formula of solution to the boundary layer system for thermal layer derived from the compressible Navier-Stokes equations with the non-slip boundary condition when the viscosity coefficients vanish is given, in particular in three space dimension. In contrast to the inviscid Prandtl system studied by [7] in two space dimension, the main difficulty comes from the coupling of the velocity field and the temperature field through a degenerate parabolic equation. The convergence of these boundary layer equations to the inviscid Prandtl system is justified when the initial temperature…
We prove asymptotic stability of shear flows in a neighborhood of the Couette flow for the 2D Euler equations in the domain $\T\times[0,1]$. More precisely we prove that if we start with a small and smooth perturbation (in a suitable Gevrey space) of the Couette flow, then the velocity field converges strongly to a nearby shear flow. The vorticity, which is initially assumed to be supported in the interior of the channel, will remain supported in the interior of the channel, will be driven to higher frequencies by the linear flow, and will converge weakly to $0$ as $t\to\infty$, modulo the she…
We prove the asymptotic stability of shear flows close to the Couette flow for the 2-D inhomogeneous incompressible Euler equations on $\mathbb{T}\times \mathbb{R}$. More precisely, if the initial velocity is close to the Couette flow and the initial density is close to a positive constant in the Gevrey class 2, then 2-D inhomogeneous incompressible Euler equations are globally well-posed and the velocity converges strongly to a shear flow close to the Couette flow, and the vorticity will be driven to small scales by a linear evolution and weakly converges as $t\to \infty$. To our knowledge, t…
This paper is concerned with the eigenvalues and linear inviscid damping of the 2D capillary gravity water waves of finite depth $x_2\in(-h,0)$ linearized at a monotone shear flow $U(x_2)$. Unlike the linearized Euler equation in a fixed channel where eigenvalues exist only in low horizontal wave number $k$, we first prove the linearized capillary gravity wave has two branches of eigenvalues $-ikc^\pm(k)$, where the wave speeds $c^\pm(k)=O(\sqrt{|k|})$ for $|k|\gg1$ have the same asymptotics as the those of the linear irrotational capillary gravity waves. Under the additional assumption of $U"…
In this paper, we investigate linear stability properties of the 2D isentropic compressible Euler equations linearized around a shear flow given by a monotone profile, close to the Couette flow, with constant density, in the domain $\mathbb{T}\times \mathbb{R}$. We begin by directly investigating the Couette shear flow, where we characterize the linear growth of the compressible part of the fluid while proving time decay for the incompressible part (inviscid damping with slower rates). Then we extend the analysis to monotone shear flows near Couette, where we are able to give an upper bound, s…
In this note we revisit the proof of Bedrossian and Masmoudi [arXiv:1306.5028] about the inviscid damping of planar shear flows in the 2D Euler equations under the assumption of zero mean perturbation. We prove that a small perturbation to the 2D Euler Couette flow in $\mathbb{T}\times \mathbb{R}$ strongly converge to zero, under the additional assumption that the average in $x$ is always zero. In general the mean is not a conserved quantity for the nonlinear dynamics, for this reason this is a particular case. Nevertheless our assumption allow the presence of echoes in the problem, which we c…
We consider the problem of asymptotic stability and linear inviscid damping for perturbations of a point vortex and similar degenerate circular flows. Here, key challenges include the lack of strict monotonicity and the necessity of working in weighted Sobolev spaces whose weights degenerate as the radius tends to zero or infinity. Prototypical examples are given by circular flows with power law singularities or zeros as $r\downarrow 0$ or $r \uparrow \infty$.
Motivated by the paper by D. Gerard-Varet and E. Dormy [JAMS, 2010] about the linear ill-posedness for the Prandtl equations around a shear flow with exponential decay in normal variable, and the recent study of well-posedness on the Prandtl equations in Sobolev spaces, this paper aims to extend the result in \cite{GV-D} to the case when the shear flow has general decay. The key observation is to construct an approximate solution that captures the initial layer to the linearized problem motivated by the precise formulation of solutions to the inviscid Prandtl equations.
G-equations are well-known front propagation models in turbulent combustion and describe the front motion law in the form of local normal velocity equal to a constant (laminar speed) plus the normal projection of fluid velocity. In level set formulation, G-equations are Hamilton-Jacobi equations with convex ($L^1$ type) but non-coercive Hamiltonians. Viscous G-equations arise from either numerical approximations or regularizations by small diffusion. The nonlinear eigenvalue $\bar H$ from the cell problem of the viscous G-equation can be viewed as an approximation of the inviscid turbulent fla…
We consider a class of invariant measures for a passive scalar $f$ driven by an incompressible velocity field $\boldsymbol{u}$, on a $d$-dimensional periodic domain, satisfying $$ \partial_t f + \boldsymbol{u} \cdot \nabla f = 0, \qquad f(0)=f_0. $$ The measures are obtained as limits of stochastic viscous perturbations. We prove that the span of the $H^1$ eigenfunctions of the operator $\boldsymbol{u}\cdot\nabla$ contains the support of these measures. We also analyze several explicit examples: when $\boldsymbol{u}$ is a shear flow or a relaxation enhancing flow (a generalization of weakly mi…
We consider barotropic instability of shear flows for incompressible fluids with Coriolis effects. For a class of shear flows, we develop a new method to find the sharp stability conditions. We study the flow with Sinus profile in details and obtain the sharp stability boundary in the whole parameter space, which corrects previous results in the fluid literature. Our new results are confirmed by more accurate numerical computation. The addition of the Coriolis force is found to bring fundamental changes to the stability of shear flows. Moreover, we study dynamical behaviors near the shear flow…
It is well known in the combustion community that curvature effect in general slows down flame propagation speeds because it smooths out wrinkled flames. However, such a folklore has never been justified rigorously. In this paper, as the first theoretical result in this direction, we prove that the turbulent flame speed (an effective burning velocity) is decreasing with respect to the curvature diffusivity (Markstein number) for shear flows in the well known G-equation model. Our proof involves several novel and rather sophisticated inequalities arising from the nonlinear structure of the equa…
