Isolatedness of characteristic points at blowup for a 1-dimensional semilinear wave equation (Q1928330)

This paper is a continuation of a recent paper of the authors [Am. J. Math. 134, No. 3, 581--648 (2012; Zbl 1252.35204)] on the blow-up curve for the one-dimensional equation \[ u_{tt}-u_{xx}=|u|^{p-1}u, \] where \(p>1\) and the data are locally in \(H^1\times L^2\). The main point of this paper is that the set of characteristic points of the blow-up curve consists of isolated points. The behavior of the blow-up curve near a given characteristic point is related to the number of sign changes of \(u\) near that point. The method seeks to adapt methods that were successful for certain classes of parabolic PDEs.