Global existence of smooth solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations for initial data with infinite energy

Abstract

We prove the global existence of solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations for any divergence-free distributional initial data. The solutions are smooth in both time and space at positive times. When the initial data belong to the Sobolev spaces $W^{-1,p}$ for $1<p<\infty$, our constructed solutions are weak in the classical sense. We also characterize the distributional initial data admitting weak solutions and obtain the sharp ranges in Besov and Triebel-Lizorkin spaces.