Global stability of three dimensional steady Prandtl equation

Abstract

The well-posedness of three dimensional Prandtl equation is an outstanding open problem despite of the study in analytic and Gevrey function spaces. This problem is raised as the third open problem in the classical monograph by Oleinik and Samokhin [43]. The paper aims to address this open problem in the steady case by introducing a novel approach to establish the global stability of background profile that includes the celebrated Blasius solutions, which is of particular interest in light of the recent affirmation of Prandtl's ansatz in two dimensional steady setting by Iyer and Masmoudi [32]. In three dimensions, the well-established analytic approaches for two dimensional setting can not be applied because of the appearance of the secondary flow. Rather than employing cancellation mechanisms or coordinate transforms, we introduce new intrinsic vector fields featuring curvature-type commutators and establish vector field-based maximum principles through pointwise and integral estimates to address the loss of tangential derivatives.