2008/05/30 by Terence Tao, Tao, Terence · 8 citations
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #35L70 #Advanced Mathematical Physics Problems #Analysis of PDEs (math.AP) #Differential Geometry (math.DG) #FOS: Mathematics #Navier-Stokes equation solutions #Nonlinear Waves and Solitons #math.AP #math.DG #msc:35L70
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0805.4666
35 pages, no figures. References updated. Will not be published in current form, pending future reorganisation of the heatwave project
openalex publication_date 2008/05/30 · arxiv created 2009/08/08 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We show that wave maps ϕ from two-dimensional Minkowski space \R1+2 to hyperbolic spaces \Hm are globally smooth in time if the initial data is smooth, conditionally on some reasonable claims concerning the local theory of such wave maps, as well as the self-similar and travelling (or stationary solutions); we will address these claims in the sequels \citetao:heatwave2, \citetao:heatwave3, \citetao:heatwave4 to this paper. Following recent work in critical dispersive equations, the strategy is to reduce matters to the study of an almost periodic maximal Cauchy development in the energy class. We then repeatedly analyse the stress-energy tensor of this development (as in \citetao:forges) to extract either a self-similar, travelling, or degenerate non-trivial energy class solution to the wave maps equation. We will then rule out such solutions in the sequels to this paper, establishing the desired global regularity result for wave maps.