Exponential growth and decay in the ideal induction equation

Abstract

We construct a divergence-free velocity field on the three-dimensional torus that is time-periodic and consists of three alternating piecewise-affine shears. For sufficiently large shear amplitude, every non-zero divergence-free initial field in $L^p$ grows exponentially under the ideal induction equation. The proof establishes a uniform cone condition for the time-one map, and combines it with a bunching inequality to rule out nontrivial divergence-free fields lying almost everywhere in the stable bundle. Additionally, we show that for the time-reversed velocity, whose time-one map is the inverse of the original one, there exist nontrivial, bounded, divergence-free initial configurations taking values almost everywhere in its two-dimensional stable bundle. The corresponding solution decays exponentially in every $L^p$.