Vanishing viscosity as a selection principle for the Euler equations: The case of 3D shear flow

Abstract: We show that for a certain family of initial data, there exist non-unique weak solutions to the 3D incompressible Euler equations satisfying the weak energy inequality, whereas the weak limit of every sequence of Leray-Hopf weak solutions for the Navier-Stokes equations, with the same initial data, and as the viscosity tends to zero, is uniquely determined and equals the shear flow solution of the Euler equations. This simple example suggests that, also in more general situations, the vanishing viscosity limit of the Navier-Stokes equations could serve as a uniqueness criterion for weak solutions of the Euler equations.