Relaxation enhancement by controlled incompressible fluid flows

We propose a PDE-controllability based approach to the enhancement of diffusive mixing for passive scalar fields. Unlike in the existing literature, our relaxation enhancing fields are not prescribed ab initio at every time and at every point of the spatial domain. Instead, we prove that time-dependent relaxation enhancing vector fields can be obtained as state trajectories of control systems described by the incompressible Euler equations either driven by finite-dimensional controls or by controls localized in space. The main ingredient of our proof is a new approximate controllability theorem for the incompressible Euler equations on the two dimensional torus, ensuring the approximate tracking of the full state all over the considered time interval. Combining this with a continuous dependence result yields enhanced relaxation for the passive scalar field. Another essential tool in our analysis is the exact controllability of the incompressible Euler system driven by spatially localized forces.