Hadamard ill-posedness of the linearised Prandtl equations in Gevrey spaces
We prove Hadamard ill-posedness for the non-autonomous linearised Prandtl equations around time-dependent shear-flow equilibria in function spaces up to Gevrey class 4. More precisely, we construct compactly supported smooth initial data, Gevrey class 4 in the tangential variable, for which the system admits no weak solution for any positive lifespan. In this regard, we improve previous results by showing that classical semigroup-type instabilities do not, by themselves, imply Hadamard ill-posedness in the non-autonomous case when the initial time is not a variable of the system. Our argument is based on a family of exact unstable modes whose $L^2$-norms grow, at tangential frequency $k$, like $\exp(c \sqrt k t)$ up to times of order $t \sim k^{-1/4}$. Their construction relies on an inner-outer gluing scheme, in the spirit of matched asymptotic expansions, which combines unstable inner solutions near a non-degenerate critical point with an exact outer solution and yields exponentially small matching errors for short times.
Authors
- Joshua Kortum (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5410-1382)
- Francesco De Anna (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6213-5651)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Journal of Differential Equations
- Published
- 2026-11-03
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jde.2026.114870
- Primary Topic
- Navier-Stokes equation solutions
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00