English

Sharp non-uniqueness for the Navier-Stokes equations in scaling critical spaces

Analysis of PDEs 2026-03-17 v3

Abstract

It is known that uniqueness of mild solutions to the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations holds in the critical class C([0,T);Ln(Rn))C([0,T);L^n(\mathbb{R}^n)) for n3n \geqslant 3. In this paper, we prove that this result is sharp in the sense that uniqueness fails if Ln(Rn)L^n(\mathbb{R}^n) is replaced by some scaling critical spaces that are even slightly larger. We achieve this through a complete classification for every pair (p,q)(p,q) of whether uniqueness of mild solutions in the critical Besov class C([0,T);B˙p,qn/p1(Rn))C([0,T);\dot{B}_{p,q}^{n/p-1}(\mathbb{R}^n)) holds or not. Our non-uniqueness mechanism produces infinitely many global solutions emanating even from zero initial state, whose large-time asymptotics are governed by non-trivial stationary flow. To the best of our knowledge, such non-unique solutions provide the first examples of non-dissipative unforced Navier-Stokes flow with critical regularity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.19846,
  title  = {Sharp non-uniqueness for the Navier-Stokes equations in scaling critical spaces},
  author = {Mikihiro Fujii},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.19846},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

The author corrected some harmless errors in the paper