A note on the ill-posedness of shear flow for the MHD boundary layer equations

Abstract

For the two-dimensional Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) boundary layer system, it has been shown that the non-degenerate tangential magnetic field leads to the well-posedness in Sobolevspaces and high Reynolds number limits without any monotonicity condition on the velocity field in our previous works.This paper aims to show that sufficient degeneracy in thetangential magnetic field at a non-degenerate critical point of the tangential velocity field of shear flow indeed yields instability as for the classical Prandtl equations without magnetic field studied by Gerard-Varet and Dormy (2010). This partially shows the necessity of thenon-degeneracy in the tangential magnetic field for the stability of the boundary layer of MHD in 2D at least in Sobolev spaces.