Stability of Two-dimensional Viscous Incompressible Flows Under Three-dimensional Perturbations and Inviscid Symmetry Breaking

In this article we consider weak solutions of the three-dimensional incompressible fluid flow equations with initial data admitting a one-dimensional symmetry group. We examine both the viscous and inviscid cases. For the case of viscous flows, we prove that Leray-Hopf weak solutions of the three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations preserve initially imposed symmetry and that such symmetric flows are stable under general three-dimensional perturbations, globally in time. We work in three different contexts: two-and-a-half-dimensional, helical and axi-symmetric flows. In the inviscid case, we observe that, as a consequence of recent work by De Lellis and Sz\'ekelyhidi, there are genuinely three-dimensional weak solutions of the Euler equations with two-dimensional initial data. We also present two partial results where restrictions on the set of initial data, and on the set of admissible solutions rule out spontaneous symmetry breaking; one is due to P.-L. Lions and the other is a consequence of our viscous stability result.