Stable ODE-type blowup for some quasilinear wave equations with derivative-quadratic nonlinearities (Q2299291)

The author proves a constructive stable ODE-type blowup result for open sets of solutions to a family of quasilinear wave equations in three spatial dimensions featuring a Riccati-type derivative-quadratic semilinear term. For the equation it is assumed that the quasilinear terms satisfy certain structural assumptions, which in particular ensure that the ``elliptic part'' of the wave operator vanishes precisely at the singular points. The initial data are assumed to be compactly supported and small or large in \(L^{\infty}\), but the spatial derivatives must initially satisfy a nonlinear smallness condition compared to the time derivative. As a corollary of the main results, it is shown that there are quasilinear wave equations that exhibit two distinct kinds of blowup: the formation of shocks for one non-trivial set of data, and ODE-type blowup for another non-trivial set.