Are the incompressible 3d Navier-Stokes equations locally ill-posed in the natural energy space?

Abstract: An important open problem in the theory of the Navier-Stokes equations is the uniqueness of the Leray-Hopf weak solutions with $L^2$ initial data. In this paper we give sufficient conditions for non-uniqueness in terms of spectral properties of a natural linear operator associated to scale-invariant solutions recently constructed in \cite{JiaSverak}. If the spectral conditions are satisfied, non-uniqueness and ill-posedness can appear for quite benign compactly supported data, just at the borderline of applicability of the classical perturbation theory. The verification of the spectral conditions seems to be approachable by relatively straightforward numerical simulations which involve only smooth functions.