Transporting microstructure and dissipative Euler flows

Abstract

Recently the second and third author developed an iterative scheme for obtaining rough solutions of the 3D incompressible Euler equations in H\"older spaces (arXiv:1202.1751 and arXiv:1205.3626 (2012)). The motivation comes from Onsager's conjecture. The construction involves a superposition of weakly interacting perturbed Beltrami flows on infinitely many scales. An obstruction to better regularity arises from the errors in the linear transport of a fast periodic flow by a slow velocity field. In a recent paper P. Isett (arXiv:1211.4065) has improved upon our methods, introducing some novel ideas on how to deal with this obstruction, thereby reaching a better H\"older exponent - albeit below the one conjectured by Onsager. In this paper we give a shorter proof of Isett's final result, adhering more to the original scheme and introducing some new devices. More precisely we show that for any positive $\epsilon$ there exist periodic solutions of the 3D incompressible Euler equations which dissipate the total kinetic energy and belong to the H\"older class $C^{\frac{1}{5}-\epsilon}$.