Gevrey Regularity for the Attractor of the 3D Navier–Stokes–Voight Equations

Recently, the Navier–Stokes–Voight (NSV) model of viscoelastic incompressible fluid has been proposed as a regularization of the 3D Navier–Stokes equations for the purpose of direct numerical simulations. In this work, we prove that the global attractor of the 3D NSV equations, driven by an analytic forcing, consists of analytic functions. A consequence of this result is that the spectrum of the solutions of the 3D NSV system, lying on the global attractor, have exponentially decaying tail, despite the fact that the equations behave like a damped hyperbolic system, rather than the parabolic one. This result provides additional evidence that the 3D NSV with the small regularization parameter enjoys similar statistical properties as the 3D Navier–Stokes equations. Finally, we calculate a lower bound for the exponential decaying scale—the scale at which the spectrum of the solution start to decay exponentially, and establish a similar bound for the steady state solutions of the 3D NSV and 3D Navier–Stokes equations. Our estimate coincides with the known bounds for the smallest length scale of the solutions of the 3D Navier–Stokes equations, established earlier by Doering and Titi.