Stability and optimal decay for the 3D Navier-Stokes equations with horizontal dissipation

Abstract Stability and large-time behavior are essential properties of solutions to many partial differential equations (PDEs) and play crucial roles in many practical applications. When there is full Laplacian, many techniques such as the Fourier splitting method have been created to obtain the large-time decay rates. However, when a PDE is anisotropic and involves only partial dissipation, these methods no longer apply and no effective approach is currently available. This paper aims at the stability and large-time behavior of the 3D anisotropic Navier-Stokes equations. We present a systematic approach to obtain the optimal decay rates of the stable solutions emanating from a small data. We establish that, if the initial velocity is small in the Sobolev space H 4 ( R 3 ) ∩ H h − σ ( R 3 ) , then the anisotropic Navier-Stokes equations have a unique global solution, and the solution and its first-order derivatives all decay at the optimal rates. Here H h − σ with σ > 0 denotes a Sobolev space with negative horizontal index.