Shock formation for 2\(D\) quasilinear wave systems featuring multiple speeds: blowup for the fastest wave, with non-trivial interactions up to the singularity (Q1661421)

The author proves a stable shock formation result for a large class of 2-D systems of quasilinear wave equations and give a precise description of the dynamics all the way up to the singularity. The main theorem applies to systems of two wave equations featuring two distinct wave speeds and various quasilinear and semilinear nonlinearities, while the solutions under study are (non-symmetric) perturbations of simple outgoing plane symmetric waves. To the best of the reviewer's knowledge, it is the first result on the shock formation problem for nonlinear wave systems with many unknowns and multiple speeds in high dimension case and can give some insights on the shock formation problem for nonlinear elastic wave equations with nonradial and small initial data.