On the Cauchy Problem for the Hall and Electron Magnetohydrodynamic Equations Without Resistivity I: Illposedness Near Degenerate Stationary Solutions

Abstract

In this article, we prove various illposedness results for the Cauchy problem for the incompressible Hall- and electron-magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equations without resistivity. These PDEs are fluid descriptions of plasmas, where the effect of collisions is neglected (no resistivity), while the motion of the electrons relative to the ions (Hall current term) is taken into account. The Hall current term endows the magnetic field equation with a quasilinear dispersive character, which is key to our mechanism for illposedness. Perhaps the most striking conclusion of this article is that the Cauchy problems for the Hall-MHD (either viscous or inviscid) and the electron-MHD equations, under one translational symmetry, are ill-posed near the trivial solution in any sufficiently high regularity Sobolev space $$H^{s}$$ and even in any Gevrey spaces. This result holds despite obvious wellposedness of the linearized equations near the trivial solution, as well as conservation of the nonlinear energy, by which the $$L^{2}$$ norm (energy) of the solution stays constant in time. The core illposedness (or instability) mechanism is degeneration of certain high frequency wave packet solutions to the linearization around a class of linearly degenerate stationary solutions of these equations, which are essentially dispersive equations with degenerate principal symbols. The method developed in this work is sharp and robust, in that we also prove nonlinear $$H^{s}$$ -illposedness (for s arbitrarily high) in the presence of fractional dissipation of any order less than 1, matching the previously known wellposedness results. The results in this article are complemented by a companion work, where we provide geometric conditions on the initial magnetic field that ensure wellposedness(!) of the Cauchy problems for the incompressible Hall and electron-MHD equations. In particular, in stark contrast to the results here, it is shown in the companion work that the nonlinear Cauchy problems are well-posed near any nonzero constant magnetic field.