Advection-diffusion equation with rough coefficients: weak solutions and vanishing viscosity

In the first part of the paper, we study the Cauchy problem for the advection-diffusion equation $\partial_t v + \text{div }(v\boldsymbol{b} ) = \Delta v$ associated with a merely integrable, divergence-free vector field $\boldsymbol{b}$ defined on the torus. We establish existence, regularity and uniqueness results for various notions of solutions, in different regimes of integrability both for the vector field and for the initial datum. In the second part of the paper, we use the advection-diffusion equation to build a vanishing viscosity scheme for the transport/continuity equation drifted by $\boldsymbol{b}$, i.e. $\partial_t u + \text{div }(u\boldsymbol{b} ) = 0$. Under Sobolev assumptions on $\boldsymbol{b}$, we give two independent proofs of the convergence of such scheme to the Lagrangian solution of the transport equation. One of the proofs is quantitative and yields rates of convergence. This offers a completely general selection criterion for the transport equation (even beyond the distributional regime) which compensates the wild non-uniqueness phenomenon for solutions with low integrability arising from convex integration schemes, as shown in recent works [10, 31, 32, 33], and rules out the possibility of anomalous dissipation.