Energy decay for the wave equation in exterior domains with some half-linear dissipation. (Q1413606)

The authors consider the initial-boundary value problem for wave equations with a dissipation of the type \[ \begin{aligned} u_{tt} - \Delta u + \rho (x, u_t) = 0 &\text{ in }\Omega\times (0, \infty ),\\ u(x,0)=u_0, u_t(x,0)=u_1 &\text{ in } \Omega,\\ u(x, t)=0 &\text{ on } \partial\Omega\times (0, \infty ), \end{aligned} \] where \(\Omega\) is an exterior domain in a Euclidean space, \(\rho \) is a given function. The decay estimates of the energy are studied. No geometrical condition is imposed on the boundary. As an application of the decay estimates some global existence theorems are proved for the wave equation with a nonlinear source term.