On the Endpoint Regularity in Onsager's Conjecture

Abstract

Onsager's conjecture states that the conservation of energy may fail for 3D incompressible Euler flows with Hölder regularity below 1/3. This conjecture was recently solved by the author, yet the endpoint case remains an interesting open question with further connections to turbulence theory. In this work, we construct energy non-conserving solutions to the 3D incompressible Euler equations with space-time Hölder regularity converging to the critical exponent at small spatial scales and containing the entire range of exponents [0,1/3). Our construction improves the author's previous result towards the endpoint case. To obtain this improvement, we introduce a new method for optimizing the regularity that can be achieved by a general convex integration scheme. A crucial point is to avoid power-losses in frequency in the estimates of the iteration. This goal is achieved using localization techniques of [IO16b] to modify the convex integration scheme. We also prove results on general solutions at the critical regularity that may not conserve energy. These include the fact that singularites of positive space-time Lebesgue measure are necessary for any energy non-conserving solution to exist while having critical regularity of an integrability exponent greater than three.