Bifurcations of viscous shear flows in a strip

Abstract

It is well-established that shear flows in a periodic strip are linearly unstable for the incompressible Navier Stokes equations provided the viscosity is small enough. In this article, under a natural spectral assumption which is satisfied for convex or concave analytic flows, we prove that shear flows undergo a Hopf bifurcation near their upper marginal stability curve. In particular, near this curve, there exist solutions which are periodic in $t$ and $x$.