No anomalous dissipation in two-dimensional incompressible fluids

Abstract

We prove that any sequence of vanishing viscosity Leray-Hopf solutions to the periodic two-dimensional incompressible Navier-Stokes equations does not display anomalous dissipation if the initial vorticity is a measure with positive singular part. A key step in the proof is the use of the Delort-Majda concentration-compactness argument to exclude formation of atoms in the vorticity measure, which in particular implies that the limiting velocity is an admissible weak solution to Euler. This is the first result proving absence of dissipation in a class of solutions in which the velocity fails to be strongly compact in $L^2$, putting two-dimensional turbulence in sharp contrast with respect to that in three dimensions. Moreover, our proof reveals that the amount of energy dissipation can be bounded by the vorticity measure of a disk of size $\sqrt \nu$, matching the two-dimensional Kolmogorov dissipative length scale which is expected to be sharp.