On rotated backwards self-similar solutions of the incompressible 3D Navier-Stokes equations

Abstract

We consider backwards globally self-similar solutions of the 3D incompressible Navier-Stokes equations which are invariant under the joint action of scaling (the natural parabolic scaling) and rotation about a given axis, at a constant angular speed $\alpha$ in self-similar time. For these so-called rotated self-similar solutions (RSS), we prove that if they satisfy a Type~I upper bound, and if the rotation parameter $\alpha$ is either too small, or too large, then they must be trivial. This Liouville-type result extends the classical works of Ne\v{c}as-R\r{u}\v{z}i\v{c}ka-\v{S}ver\'ak ('96) and Tsai ('98), which only consider $\alpha=0$, to the case of similarity profiles which experience nontrivial rotation. Our results partially answer a question posed by Perelman. For backwards globally self-similar solutions which are invariant under the discrete action of scaling and rotation, the so-called rotated discretely self-similar solutions (RDSS), we obtain similar Liouville-type results under a Type~I upper bound, assuming extreme values of the rotation parameter $\alpha$, and if the scaling factor $\lambda$ is sufficiently close to $1$. We also establish a new regularity criterion for 3D Navier-Stokes which is local in nature: if the solution satisfies a Type~I upper bound in a unit parabolic cylinder, and there is a single time-slice at which the solution is locally approximately self-similar, then the top-center of the parabolic cylinder is a regular point of the Navier-Stokes flow. The proof of all these results rests on the introduction of a robust weighted-$L^2$ framework. In particular, our method is quantitative and is not sensitive to whether the Bernoulli head pressure satisfies a maximum principle, which was a key obstruction in previous works.