Observations on the vanishing viscosity limit

Abstract

Whether, in the presence of a boundary, solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations converge to a solution to the Euler equations in the vanishing viscosity limit is unknown. In a seminal 1983 paper, Tosio Kato showed that the vanishing viscosity limit is equivalent to having sufficient control of the gradient of the Navier-Stokes velocity in a boundary layer of width proportional to the viscosity. In a 2008 paper, the present author showed that the vanishing viscosity limit is equivalent to the formation of a vortex sheet on the boundary. We present here several observations that follow on from these two papers.