Hatem Zaag

Université Sorbonne Paris Nord

A stylized pyramid-shaped blow-up set for the 2d semilinear wave equation

We consider the semilinear wave equation with subconformal power nonlinearity in two space dimensions. We construct a finite-time blow-up solution with an isolated characteristic blow-up point at the origin, and a blow-up surface which is centered at the origin and has the shape of a stylized pyramid, whose edges follow the bisectrices of the axes in \(\mathbb R^2\). The blow-up surface is differentiable outside the bisectrices. As for the asymptotic behavior in similarity variables, the solution converges to the classical one-dimensional soliton outside the bisectrices. On the bisectrices outside the origin, it converges (up to a subsequence) to a genuinely two-dimensional stationary solution, whose existence is a by-product of the proof. At the origin, it behaves like the sum of 4 solitons localized on the two axes, with opposite signs for neighbors.

This is the first example of a blow-up solution with a characteristic point in higher dimensions, showing a really two-dimensional behavior. Moreover, the points of the bisectrices outside the origin give us the first example of non-characteristic points where the blow-up surface is non-differentiable.

This is a joint work with Frank Merle, Cergy Paris University and IHES.