Energy decay rate of the wave equations on Riemannian manifolds with critical potential (Q1670368)

In this article the authors prove two decay results for the energy of solutions of the wave-equation-with-potential on a semi-infinite tube over a Riemannian manifold. More precisely, let \((M,g)\) be an \(m\)-dimensional Riemannian manifold and consider a Cauchy problem on \((0,+\infty )\times M\) as follows: \[ \begin{cases} u_{tt}(t,x)-\Delta u(t,x)+V(x)u_t(t,x)=0 & \text{ for }(t,x)\in (0,+\infty )\times M \\ u(0, x)=u_0(x)\text{ and }u_t(0,x)=u_1(x) & \text{ for }x\in M \end{cases} \] with initial values \(u_0\in H^1(M)\), \(u_1\in L^2(M)\) and potential \(V\in L^\infty (M)\cap C^1(M)\) satisfying the bounds \(V_0\left(1+\rho (x)^2\right)^{-\frac{1}{2}}\leqq V(x)\leqq V_1\left(1+\rho (x)^2\right)^{-\frac{1}{2}}\) where \(V_0\), \(V_1\) are constants and \(\rho\) being the Riemannian distance function on \((M,g)\) from a fixed point \(o\in M\). The \textit{energy} of the solution \(u\) is \[ E(t):=\frac{1}{2}\int\limits_{\{t\}\times M}\left(u_t^2+| \nabla u|^2_g\right)\mathrm dg \] where \(\nabla\) is the Levi-Civita connection of the metric. The authors' main result (see Theorem 1.1 in the article) is an estimate \[ E(t)=O(t^{-1+\delta})\text{ as }t\rightarrow +\infty \] where, if \(V_0\geqq 1\), then \(\delta\in (0,1)\) and if \(0<V_0<1\), then \(\delta\in (1-V_0,1)\). Moreover, under some further technical assumptions on the curvature of \((M,g)\) a refined estimate is proved, too (see Theorem 1.2 in the article).