The Sobolev Stability Threshold for 2D Shear Flows Near Couette

We consider the 2D Navier–Stokes equation on \(\mathbb T \times \mathbb R\), with initial datum that is \(\varepsilon \)-close in \(H^N\) to a shear flow (U(y), 0), where \(\Vert U(y) - y\Vert _{H^{N+4}} \ll 1\) and \(N>1\). We prove that if \(\varepsilon \ll \nu ^{1/2}\), where \(\nu \) denotes the inverse Reynolds number, then the solution of the Navier–Stokes equation remains \(\varepsilon \)-close in \(H^1\) to \((e^{t \nu \partial _{yy}}U(y),0)\) for all \(t>0\). Moreover, the solution converges to a decaying shear flow for times \(t \gg \nu ^{-1/3}\) by a mixing-enhanced dissipation effect, and experiences a transient growth of gradients. In particular, this shows that the stability threshold in finite regularity scales no worse than \(\nu ^{1/2}\) for 2D shear flows close to the Couette flow.