Nonlinear stability threshold for compressible Couette flow

Abstract

This paper concerns the Couette flow for 2-D compressible Navier-Stokes equations (N-S) in an infinitely long flat torus $\Torus\times\R$. Compared to the incompressible flow, the compressible Couette flow has a stronger lift-up effect and weaker dissipation. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no work on the nonlinear stability in the cases of high Reynolds number until now and only linear stability was known in \cite{ADM2021,ZZZ2022}.In this paper, we study the nonlinear stability of 2-D compressible Couette flow in Sobolev space at high Reynolds numbers. Moreover, we also show the enhanced dissipation phenomenon and stability threshold for the compressible Couette flow. First, We decompose the perturbation into zero and non-zero modes and obtain two systems for these components, respectively. Different from \cite{ADM2021,ZZZ2022}, we use the anti-derivative technique to study the zero-mode system. We introduce a kind of diffusion wave to remove the excessive mass of the zero-modes and construct coupled diffusion waves along characteristics to improve the resulting time decay rates of error terms and derive a new integrated system \cref{anti}. Secondly, we observe a cancellation with the new system \cref{anti} so that the lift-up effect is weakened. Thirdly, the large time behavior of the zero-modes is obtained by the weighted energy method and a weighted inequality on the heat kernel \cite{HLM2010}.In addition, with the help of the Fourier multipliers method, we can show the enhanced dissipation phenomenon for the non-zero modes by commutator estimates to avoid loss of derivatives. Finally, we complete the higher-order derivative estimates to close the a priori assumptions by the energy method and show the stability threshold.