The effect of linear stratification on the stability of a rest state in the 2D inviscid Boussinesq system

Abstract

We investigate and quantify the effect of stratification on the stability time of a stably stratified rest state for the 2D inviscid Boussinesq system on $\mathbb{R}^2$. As an important consequence, we obtain stability of the steady state starting from an $\varepsilon$-sized initial perturbation of Sobolev regularity $H^{3^+}$ on a timescale $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-4/3})$. In our setting, stratification induces dispersion and at the core of our approach are inhomogeneous Strichartz estimates used to control nonlinear contributions. This allows to keep only $L^2-$based regularity assumptions on the initial perturbation, whereas previous works impose additional localizations to achieve this timescale. We prove the analogous result for the related dispersive SQG equation.