On the formation of shock for quasilinear wave equations with weak intensity pulse (Q1661425)

This a continuation work of the author and \textit{P. Yu} [Invent. Math. 207, No. 2, 697--831 (2017; Zbl 1362.35248)]. The author considers the shock formation for the 3-D quasilinear wave equation \[ -(1+3G^{''}(0)(\partial_tu)^2)\partial_t^2u+\Delta u=0 \] which can be viewed as a model equation for describing the propagation of electromagnetic waves in nonlinear dielectric. This equation admits global classical solutions with small data, thus to present shock formation, the author considers a class of large data. In the previous work, the data is imposed on the hypersurface \(\{(t,x):t=-2\}\), while in this paper, the data is impose on \(\{(t,x):t=-r_0\}\), where \(r_0\) is arbitrarily large. The author proves an a priori energy estimate independent of \(r_0\). Therefore a complete description of the solution behavior as \(r_0\rightarrow \infty\) can be obtained. This allows to relax the restriction on the profile of initial data which still guarantees shock formation.