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We prove that the $3$-dimensional catenoid is asymptotically stable as a solution to the hyperbolic vanishing mean curvature equation in Minkowski space, modulo suitable translation and boost (i.e., modulation) and with respect to a codimension one set of initial data perturbations. The modulation and the codimension one restriction on the initial data are necessary (and optimal) in view of the kernel and the unique simple eigenvalue, respectively, of the stability operator of the catenoid. The $3$-dimensional problem is more challenging than the higher (specifically, $5$ and higher) dimensional case addressed in the previous work of the authors with J.~L\"uhrmann, due to slower temporal decay of waves and slower spatial decay of the catenoid. To overcome these issues, we introduce several innovations, such as a proof of Morawetz- (or local-energy-decay-) estimates for the linearized operator with slowly decaying kernel elements based on the Darboux transform, a new method to obtain Price's-law-type bounds for waves on a moving catenoid, as well as a refined profile construction designed to capture a crucial cancellation in the wave-catenoid interaction. In conjunction with our previous work on the higher dimensional case, this paper outlines a systematic approach for studying other soliton stability problems for $(3+1)$-dimensional quasilinear wave equations., Comment: 64 pages, 1 figure

We study the problem of stability of the catenoid, which is an asymptotically flat rotationally symmetric minimal surface in Euclidean space, viewed as a stationary solution to the hyperbolic vanishing mean curvature equation in Minkowski space. The latter is a quasilinear wave equation that constitutes the hyperbolic counterpart of the minimal surface equation in Euclidean space. Our main result is the nonlinear asymptotic stability, modulo suitable translation and boost (i.e., modulation), of the $n$-dimensional catenoid with respect to a codimension one set of initial data perturbations without any symmetry assumptions, for $n \geq 5$. The modulation and the codimension one restriction on the data are necessary and optimal in view of the kernel and the unique simple eigenvalue, respectively, of the stability operator of the catenoid. In a broader context, this paper fits in the long tradition of studies of soliton stability problems. From this viewpoint, our aim here is to tackle some new issues that arise due to the quasilinear nature of the underlying hyperbolic equation. Ideas introduced in this paper include a new profile construction and modulation analysis to track the evolution of the translation and boost parameters of the stationary solution, a new scheme for proving integrated local energy decay for the perturbation in the quasilinear and modulation-theoretic context, and an adaptation of the vectorfield method in the presence of dynamic translations and boosts of the stationary solution., Comment: 99 pages

The hard phase model describes a relativistic barotropic and irrotational fluid with sound speed equal to the speed of light. In the framework of general relativity, the fluid, as a matter field, affects the geometry of the background spacetime. Therefore the motion of the fluid must be coupled to the Einstein equations which describe the structure of the underlying spacetime. In this work we prove a priori estimates and well-posedness in Sobolev spaces for this model with free boundary. Estimates for the curvature are derived using the Bianchi equations in a frame that is parallel transported by the fluid velocity. The fluid velocity is also decomposed with respect to this parallel frame, and its components are estimated using a coupled interior-boundary system of wave equations.

The hard phase model describes a relativistic barotropic irrotational fluid with sound speed equal to the speed of light. In this paper, we prove the local well-posedness for this model in the Minkowski background with free boundary. Moreover, we show that as the speed of light tends to infinity, the solution of this model converges to the solution of the corresponding Newtonian free boundary problem for incompressible fluids. In the appendix we explain how to extend our proof to the general barotropic fluid free boundary problem., Comment: A rigorous treatment for the Newtonian limit is incorporated into this version

We consider the Cauchy problem for the Schr\"odinger maps evolution when the domain is the hyperbolic plane. An interesting feature of this problem compared to the more widely studied case on the Euclidean plane is the existence of a rich new family of finite energy harmonic maps. These are stationary solutions, and thus play an important role in the dynamics of Schr\"odinger maps. The main result of this article is the asymptotic stability of (some of) such harmonic maps under the Schr\"odinger maps evolution. More precisely, we prove the nonlinear asymptotic stability of a finite energy equivariant harmonic map $Q$ under the Schr\"odinger maps evolution with respect to non-equivariant perturbations, provided $Q$ obeys a suitable linearized stability condition. This condition is known to hold for all equivariant harmonic maps with values in the hyperbolic plane and for a subset of those maps taking values in the sphere. One of the main technical ingredients in the paper is a global-in-time local smoothing and Strichartz estimate for the operator obtained by linearization around a harmonic map, proved in the companion paper [36]., Comment: 85 pages

We establish global-in-time frequency localized local smoothing estimates for Schr\"odinger equations on hyperbolic space $\mathbb{H}^d$. In the presence of symmetric first and zeroth order potentials, which are possibly time-dependent, possibly large, and have sufficiently fast polynomial decay, these estimates are proved up to a localized lower order error. Then in the time-independent case, we show that a spectral condition (namely, absence of threshold resonances) implies the full local smoothing estimates (without any error), after projecting to the continuous spectrum. In the process, as a means to localize in frequency, we develop a general Littlewood-Paley machinery on $\mathbb{H}^d$ based on the heat flow. Our results and techniques are motivated by applications to the problem of stability of solitary waves to nonlinear Schr\"odinger-type equations on $\mathbb{H}^{d}$. Specifically, some of the estimates established in this paper play a crucial role in the authors' proof of the nonlinear asymptotic stability of harmonic maps under the Schr\"odinger maps evolution on the hyperbolic plane; see [29]. As a testament of the robustness of approach, which is based on the positive commutator method and a heat flow based Littlewood-Paley theory, we also show that the main results are stable under small time-dependent perturbations, including polynomially decaying second order ones, and small lower order nonsymmetric perturbations., Comment: 152 pages

In this work, which is based on an essential linear analysis carried out by Christodoulou, we study the evolution of tidal energy for the motion of two gravitating incompressible fluid balls with free boundaries obeying the Euler-Poisson equations. The orbital energy is defined as the mechanical energy of the two bodies' center of mass. According to the classical analysis of Kepler and Newton, when the fluids are replaced by point masses, the conic curve describing the trajectories of the masses is a hyperbola when the orbital energy is positive and an ellipse when the orbital energy is negative. The orbital energy is conserved in the case of point masses. If the point masses are initially very far, then the orbital energy is positive, corresponding to hyperbolic motion. However, in the motion of fluid bodies the orbital energy is no longer conserved because part of the conserved energy is used in deforming the boundaries of the bodies. In this case the total energy $\tilde{\mathcal{E}}$ can be decomposed into a sum $\tilde{\mathcal{E}}:=\widetilde{\mathcal{E}_{{\mathrm{orbital}}}}+\widetilde{\mathcal{E}_{{\mathrm{tidal}}}}$, with $\widetilde{\mathcal{E}_{{\mathrm{tidal}}}}$ measuring the energy used in deforming the boundaries, such that if $\widetilde{\mathcal{E}_{{\mathrm{orbital}}}}<-c<0$ for some absolute constant $c>0$, then the orbit of the bodies must be bounded. In this work we prove that under appropriate conditions on the initial configuration of the system, the fluid boundaries and velocity remain regular up to the point of the first closest approach in the orbit, and that the tidal energy $\widetilde{\mathcal{E}_{{\mathrm{tidal}}}}$ can be made arbitrarily large relative to the total energy $\tilde{\mathcal{E}}$. In particular under these conditions $\widetilde{\mathcal{E}_{{\mathrm{orbital}}}}$, which is initially positive, becomes negative before the point of the first closest approach., Comment: 83 pages

In a recent work [1] the authors studied the dynamics of the interface separating a vacuum from an inviscid incompressible fluid, subject to the self-gravitational force and neglecting surface tension, in two space dimensions. The fluid is additionally assumed to be irrotational, and we proved that for data which are size $\epsilon$ perturbations of an equilibrium state, the lifespan $T$ of solutions satisfies $T \gtrsim \epsilon^{-2}$. The key to the proof is to find a nonlinear transformation of the unknown function and a coordinate change, such that the equation for the new unknown in the new coordinate system has no quadratic nonlinear terms. For the related irrotational gravity water wave equation with constant gravity the analogous transformation was carried out by the last author in [3]. While our approach is inspired by the last author's work [3], the self-gravity in the present problem is a new nonlinearity which needs separate investigation. Upon completing [1] we learned of the work of Ifrim and Tataru [2] where the gravity water wave equation with constant gravity and constant vorticity is studied and a similar estimate on the lifespan of the solution is obtained. In this short note we demonstrate that our transformations in [1] can be easily modified to allow for nonzero constant vorticity, and a similar energy method as in [1] gives an estimate $T\gtrsim\epsilon^{-2}$ for the lifespan $T$ of solutions with data which are size $\epsilon$ perturbations of the equilibrium. In particular, the effect of the constant vorticity is an extra linear term with constant coefficient in the transformed equation, which can be further transformed away by a bounded linear transformation. This note serves as an appendix to the aforementioned work of the authors., Comment: 7 pages

We consider the motion of the interface separating a vacuum from an inviscid, incompressible, and irrotational fluid, subject to the self-gravitational force and neglecting surface tension, in two space dimensions. The fluid motion is described by the Euler-Poission system in moving bounded simply connected domains. A family of equilibrium solutions of the system are the perfect balls moving at constant velocity. We show that for smooth data which are small perturbations of size $\epsilon$ of these static states, measured in appropriate Sobolev spaces, the solution exists and remains of size $\epsilon$ on a time interval of length at least $c\epsilon^{-2},$ where $c$ is a constant independent of $\epsilon.$ This should be compared with the lifespan $O(\epsilon^{-1})$ provided by local well-posdness. The key ingredient of our proof is finding a nonlinear transformation which removes quadratic terms from the nonlinearity. An important difference with the related gravity water waves problem is that unlike the constant gravity for water waves, the self-gravity in the Euler-Poisson system is nonlinear. As a first step in our analysis we also show that the Taylor sign condition always holds and establish local well-posedness for this system., Comment: 73 pages

We establish global well-posedness and scattering for wave maps from $d$-dimensional hyperbolic space into Riemannian manifolds of bounded geometry for initial data that is small in the critical Sobolev space for $d \geq 4$. The main theorem is proved using the moving frame approach introduced by Shatah and Struwe. However, rather than imposing the Coulomb gauge we formulate the wave maps problem in Tao's caloric gauge, which is constructed using the harmonic map heat flow. In this setting the caloric gauge has the remarkable property that the main `gauged' dynamic equations reduce to a system of nonlinear scalar wave equations on $\mathbb{H}^{d}$ that are amenable to Strichartz estimates rather than tensorial wave equations (which arise in other gauges such as the Coulomb gauge) for which useful dispersive estimates are not known. This last point makes the heat flow approach crucial in the context of wave maps on curved domains., Comment: 71 pages

In this paper we continue the analysis of equivariant wave maps from 2-dimensional hyperbolic space into surfaces of revolution that was initiated in [13, 14]. When the target is the hyperbolic plane we proved in [13] the existence and asymptotic stability of a 1-parameter family of finite energy harmonic maps indexed by how far each map wraps around the target. Here we conjecture that each of these harmonic maps is globally asymptotically stable, meaning that the evolution of any arbitrarily large finite energy perturbation of a harmonic map asymptotically resolves into the harmonic map itself plus free radiation. Since such initial data exhaust the energy space, this is the soliton resolution conjecture for this equation. The main result is a verification of this conjecture for a nonperturbative subset of the harmonic maps

In this paper we study $k$-equivariant wave maps from the hyperbolic plane into the $2$-sphere as well as the energy critical equivariant $SU(2)$ Yang-Mills problem on $4$-dimensional hyperbolic space. The latter problem bears many similarities to a $2$-equivariant wave map into a surface of revolution. As in the case of $1$-equivariant wave maps considered in~\cite{LOS1}, both problems admit a family of stationary solutions indexed by a parameter that determines how far the image of the map wraps around the target manifold. Here we show that if the image of a stationary solution is contained in a geodesically convex subset of the target, then it is asymptotically stable in the energy space. However, for a stationary solution that covers a large enough portion of the target, we prove that the Schr\"odinger operator obtained by linearizing about such a harmonic map admits a simple positive eigenvalue in the spectral gap. As there is no a priori nonlinear obstruction to asymptotic stability, this gives evidence for the existence of metastable states (i.e., solutions with anomalously slow decay rates) in these simple geometric models., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1402.5981

The goal for this paper is twofold. Our first main objective is to develop Bahouri-Gerard type profile decompositions for waves on hyperbolic space. Recently, such profile decompositions have proved to be a versatile tool in the study of the asymptotic dynamics of solutions to nonlinear wave equations with large energy. With an eye towards further applications, we develop this theory in a fairly general framework, which includes the case of waves on hyperbolic space perturbed by a time-independent potential. Our second objective is to use the profile decomposition to address a specific nonlinear problem, namely the question of global well-posedness and scattering for the defocusing, energy critical, semi-linear wave equation on three-dimensional hyperbolic space, possibly perturbed by a repulsive time-independent potential. Using the concentration compactness/rigidity method introduced by Kenig and Merle, we prove that all finite energy initial data lead to a global evolution that scatters to linear waves in infinite time. This proof will serve as a blueprint for the arguments in a forthcoming work, where we study the asymptotic behavior of large energy equivariant wave maps on the hyperbolic plane., Comment: 80 pages

We prove peeling estimates for the small data solutions of the Maxwell Klein Gordon equations with non-zero charge and with a non-compactly supported scalar field, in $(3+1)$ dimensions. We obtain the same decay rates as in an earlier work by Lindblad and Sterbenz, but giving a simpler proof. In particular we dispense with the fractional Morawetz estimates for the electromagnetic field, as well as certain space-time estimates. In the case that the scalar field is compactly supported we can avoid fractional Morawetz estimates for the scalar field as well. All of our estimates are carried out using the double null foliation and in a gauge invariant manner., Comment: 46 pages, 1 figure, reference added

In this paper we initiate the study of equivariant wave maps from 2d hyperbolic space into rotationally symmetric surfaces. This problem exhibits markedly different phenomena than its Euclidean counterpart due to the exponential volume growth of concentric geodesic spheres on the domain. In particular, when the target is the 2-sphere, we find a family of equivariant harmonic maps indexed by a parameter that measures how far the image of each harmonic map wraps around the sphere. These maps have energies taking all values between zero and the energy of the unique co-rotational Euclidean harmonic map, Q, from the Euclidean plane to the 2-sphere, given by stereographic projection. We prove that the harmonic maps are asymptotically stable for values of the parameter smaller than a threshold that is large enough to allow for maps that wrap more than halfway around the sphere. Indeed, we prove Strichartz estimates for the operator obtained by linearizing around such a harmonic map. However, for harmonic maps with energies approaching the Euclidean energy of Q, asymptotic stability via a perturbative argument based on Strichartz estimates is precluded by the existence of gap eigenvalues in the spectrum of the linearized operator. When the target is 2d hyperbolic space, we find a continuous family of asymptotically stable equivariant harmonic maps with arbitrarily small and arbitrarily large energies. This stands in sharp contrast to the corresponding problem on Euclidean space, where all finite energy solutions scatter to zero as time tends to infinity., Comment: 51 pages. minor typos were corrected and references were added

We extend the slow blow up solutions of Krieger, Schlag, and Tataru to semilinear wave equations on a curved background. In particular, for a class of manifolds $(M,g)$ we show the existence of a family of blow-up solutions with finite energy norm to the equation {equation} \partial_t^2 u - \Delta_g u = |u|^4 u, \notag {equation} with a continuous rate of blow up. In contrast to the case where $g$ is the Minkowski metric, the argument used to produce these solutions can only obtain blow up rates that are bounded above., Comment: 17 pages

We study time and space equivariant wave maps from $M\times\RR\rightarrow S^2,$ where $M$ is diffeomorphic to a two dimensional sphere and admits an action of SO(2) by isometries. We assume that metric on $M$ can be written as $dr^2+f^2(r)d\theta^2$ away from the two fixed points of the action, where the curvature is positive, and prove that stationary (time equivariant) rotationally symmetric (of any rotation number) smooth wave maps exist and are stable in the energy topology. The main new ingredient in the construction, compared with the case where $M$ is isometric to the standard sphere (considered by Shatah and Tahvildar-Zadeh \cite{ST1}), is the the use of triangle comparison theorems to obtain pointwise bounds on the fundamental solution on a curved background.

We construct a one parameter family of finite time blow ups to the co-rotational wave maps problem from $S^2\times \RR$ to $S^2,$ parameterized by $\nu\in(1/2,1].$ The longitudinal function $u(t,\alpha)$ which is the main object of study will be obtained as a perturbation of a rescaled harmonic map of rotation index one from $\RR^2$ to $S^2.$ The domain of this harmonic map is identified with a neighborhood of the north pole in the domain $S^2$ via the exponential coordinates $(\alpha,\theta).$ In these coordinates $u(t,\alpha)=Q(\lambda(t)\alpha)+\mathcal{R}(t,\alpha),$ where $Q(r)=2\arctan{r},$ is the standard co-rotational harmonic map to the sphere, $\lambda(t)=t^{-1-\nu},$ and $\mathcal{R}(t,\alpha)$ is the error with local energy going to zero as $t\rightarrow 0.$ Blow up will occur at $(t,\alpha)=(0,0)$ due to energy concentration, and up to this point the solution will have regularity $H^{1+\nu-}.$, Comment: Modified argument in section 4 (with the corresponding sections of the introduction). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:math/0610248 by other authors