Almost global existence for nonlinear wave equations in an exterior domain in two space dimensions (Q399943)

In this paper, the author studied long time existence for a system of quasilinear wave equations, exterior to a star-shaped obstacle, in two space dimensions, with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary condition. The initial data are assumed to be small (of size \(\epsilon\)), compactly supported smooth functions. The nonlinearities are cubic in the derivatives of the unknown functions. There have been many previous works for dimension three and higher. However, concerning long time existence for dimension two, less is known on this and related topics, for examples, global solvability with nonlinear term depending only on \(u\) for (\(\partial_t^2u-\Delta u=|u|^p\), \textit{H. F. Smith} et al. [Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 364, No. 6, 3329--3347 (2012; Zbl 1246.35052)], blow up with lower bound of the lifespan \(T_\epsilon\geq \exp(c \epsilon^{-2})\) for \(\partial_t^2u-\Delta u=|u_t|^3\), \textit{Y. Zhou} and \textit{W. Han} [J. Math. Anal. Appl. 374, No. 2, 585--601 (2011; Zbl 1213.35146)]. The main results are the almost global existence with lower bound of the lifespan \(T_\epsilon\geq \exp(c \epsilon^{-2})\), which is sharp in general. It will be interesting to determine the sharp lifespan for the 2-D quadratic nonlinear wave equations.