Nonlinear monotone energy stability of plane shear flows: Joseph or Orr critical thresholds?

Abstract: Critical Reynolds numbers for the monotone exponential energy stability of Couette and Poiseuille plane flows were obtained by Orr 1907 \cite{Orr1907} in a famous paper, and by Joseph 1966 \cite{Joseph1966}, Joseph and Carmi 1969 \cite{JosephCarmi1969} and Busse 1972 \cite{Busse1972}. All these authors obtained their results applying variational methods to compute the maximum of a functional ratio derived from the Reynolds-Orr energy identity. Orr and Joseph obtained different results, for instance in the Couette case Orr computed the critical Reynolds value of 44.3 (on spanwise perturbations) and Joseph 20.65 (on streamwise perturbations). Recently in Falsaperla et al. 2022 \cite{FalsaperlaMulonePerrone2022}, the authors conjectured that the search of the maximum should be restricted to a subspace of the space of kinematically admissible perturbations. With this conjecture, the critical nonlinear energy Reynolds number was found among spanwise perturbations (a Squire theorem for nonlinear systems). With a direct proof and an appropriate and original decomposition of the dissipation terms in the Reynolds-Orr identity we show the validity of this conjecture in the space of three dimensional perturbations.