Uniform Linear Inviscid Damping and Enhanced Dissipation Near Monotonic Shear Flows in High Reynolds Number Regime (I): The Whole Space Case

We study the dynamics of the two dimensional Navier Stokes equations linearized around a strictly monotonic shear flow on $${\mathbb {T}}\times {\mathbb {R}}$$ T × R . The main task is to understand the associated Rayleigh and Orr–Sommerfeld equations, under the natural assumption that the linearized operator around the monotonic shear flow in the inviscid case has no discrete eigenvalues. We obtain precise control of solutions to the Orr–Sommerfeld equations in the high Reynolds number limit, using the perspective that the nonlocal term can be viewed as a compact perturbation with respect to the main part that includes the small diffusion term. As a corollary, we give a detailed description of the linearized flow in Gevrey spaces (linear inviscid damping) that are uniform with respect to the viscosity, and enhanced dissipation type decay estimates. The key difficulty is to accurately capture the behavior of the solution to Orr–Sommerfeld equations in the critical layer. In this paper we consider the case of shear flows on $${\mathbb {T}}\times {\mathbb {R}}$$ T × R . The case of bounded channels poses significant additional difficulties, due to the presence of boundary layers, and will be addressed elsewhere.