On the Gevrey well posedness of the Cauchy problem for weakly hyperbolic equations of higher order (Q1867229)

The authors consider the Cauchy problem for weakly hyperbolic equations with coefficients depending only on time of form: \[ \partial ^{m}_{t} = \sum _{j+k=m, j<m } ^{ } a _{{j} ,k}(t) \partial ^{j}_{t} \partial ^{k}_{x} u+ \sum _{j+k \leq \ell } ^{ } a _{j , k}(t) \partial ^{j}_{t} \partial ^{k}_{x} u ,\;\partial ^{j}_{t}u({0} ,x) = u _{j} (x) \quad (j=0, 1,\dots , m - 1). \] Here \(\ell \) is some number \(0 \leq \ell \leq m-1\) and \( a _{{j} ,k}(t) \in C ^{0}[0 , T]\) for \( j , k \) satisfying \(j+k \leq \ell \). The roots of the characteristic equation are assumed real, but not necessarily distinct. The main assumption concerns the regularity of these roots. Since there is only one space variable we can write the roots in the form \( \tau _{j} (t) \xi \). It is assumed that two Hölder indices \(\alpha \) and \( \beta \) and a natural number \(r \leq m\) are given so that the \( \tau _{1}(t), \dots , \tau _{r}(t)\) are Hölder continuous of order \(\alpha \) whereas the \( \tau _{r+1}(t), \dots , \tau _{m}(t)\) are assumed Hölder continuous of order \(\beta \). Moreover, the \( \tau _{1}, \dots , \tau _{r}\) coincide or are all distinct, and the \( \tau _{r+1}, \dots , \tau _{m}\) are all distinct. The authors then find a Gevrey index \(s\), which is calculated in terms of \(\alpha ,\beta , r\) and \(m\) so that the Cauchy problem is well-posed for Cauchy-data in \(G ^{s}(\mathbb{R})\) when the solution is sought in \(C ^{m}([{0} ,T]; G ^{s}(\mathbb{R}_{x}))\). The result extends earlier results by Colombini, de Giorgi, Janelli, Spagnolo, Ohya and Tarama.