Ill-posedness of the two-dimensional stationary Navier--Stokes equations on the whole plane

Abstract: We consider the two-dimensional stationary Navier--Stokes equations on the whole plane $\mathbb{R}^2$. In the higher-dimensional cases $\mathbb{R}^n$ with $n \geqslant 3$, the well-posedness and ill-posedness in scaling critical spaces are well-investigated by numerous papers. However, despite the attention of many researchers, the corresponding problem in the two-dimensional whole plane case was a long-standing open problem due to inherent difficulties of two-dimensional analysis. The aim of this paper is to address this issue and prove the ill-posedness in the scaling critical Besov spaces based on $L^p(\mathbb{R}^2)$ for all $1 \leqslant p \leqslant2$ in the sense of the discontinuity of the solution map and the non-existence of small solutions. To overcome the difficulty, we propose a new method based on the contradictory argument that reduces the problem to the analysis of the corresponding nonstationary Navier--Stokes equations and shows the existence of nonstationary solutions with strange large time behavior, if we suppose to contrary that the stationary problem is well-posed.