Nonlinear Instability for the Surface Quasi-Geostrophic Equation in the Supercritical Regime
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-1-2021
Abstract
We consider the forced surface quasi-geostrophic equation with supercritical dissipation. We show that linear instability for steady state solutions leads to their nonlinear instability. When the dissipation is given by a fractional Laplacian, the nonlinear instability is expressed in terms of the scaling invariant norm, while we establish stronger instability claims in the setting of logarithmically supercritical dissipation. A key tool in treating the logarithmically supercritical setting is a global well-posedness result for the forced equation, which we prove by adapting and extending recent work related to nonlinear maximum principles. We believe that our proof of global well-posedness is of independent interest, to our knowledge giving the first large-data supercritical result with sharp regularity assumptions on the forcing term.
Publication Source (Journal or Book title)
Communications in Mathematical Physics
First Page
1679
Last Page
1707
Recommended Citation
Bulut, A., & Dong, H. (2021). Nonlinear Instability for the Surface Quasi-Geostrophic Equation in the Supercritical Regime. Communications in Mathematical Physics, 384 (3), 1679-1707. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00220-021-04102-1