Scattering for the two-dimensional energy-critical wave equation (Q602055)

The authors of this very interesting paper study existence and asymptotic completeness of the wave operators for nonlinear Klein-Gordon (NLKG) equation with a defocusing exponential nonlinearity having the form \[ u_{tt}-\Delta u+u+f(u)=0, \quad u:\mathbb R^{1+2}\to\mathbb R \] and initial data \(u(0,x)=u_0(x)\in H^1(\mathbb R^2)\), \(u_t(0,x)=u_1(x)\in L^{2}(\mathbb R^2)\), where the nonlinearity \(f:\mathbb R\to\mathbb R\) is defined by \(f(u)=(e^{4\pi |u|^2}-1-4\pi |u|^2)u\). This mathematical model possesses a conserving energy \(E(u,t)=E_0(u,t)+2\int_{\mathbb R^2}F(u)\,dx\), where \(E_0\) denotes the free energy and \(F\) is the primitive of \(f\). The main result in the paper is that for the above stated NLKG equation in the subcritical and critical cases, every global solution approaches a solution of the free Klein-Gordon equation, that is, \(v_{tt}-\Delta v+v=0\) in the energy space as \(t\to\pm\infty \). This result is connected with the so called ``scattering problem''. A certain threshold is defined based on the value of the conserved Hamiltonian, so that the exponential potential energy is dominated by the kinetic energy via a Trudinger-Moser-type inequality. An interesting feature in the critical case is that the Strichartz estimate together with Sobolev-type inequalities cannot control the nonlinear term uniformly on each time interval.