Propagation of mild singularities in higher dimensional thermoelasticity (Q1969992)

The system of thermoelasticity describes elastic and thermal behavior of elastic heat-conducting media and is a coupled hyperbolic-parabolic system. In [\textit{R. Racke} and \textit{Y.-G. Wang}, J. Math. Anal. Appl. 223, 216-247 (1998; Zbl 0910.73013)] the propagation of \(H^s\)-singularities (\(s>9/2\)) of solutions to the Cauchy problem for a semilinear thermoelastic model was investigated. In this paper, the authors study the same problem in the higher-dimensional case for a (slightly) more general model. It is proved that the \(H^s\)-singularities (mild singularities) of solutions coincide with the singularities for the corresponding linear problem, for which the propagation of singularities is similar to that of wave equations. Moreover, this paper generalizes the main results from the paper cited above to the fully semilinear Cauchy problem of one-dimensional thermoelasticity under the weaker assumption \(s\geq 3\). The main ingredients in the proof are Fourier analysis and the propagation of singularities for wave operators.