Global existence for a system of multiple-speed wave equations violating the null condition (Q2679746)

The authors studied the Cauchy problem for a system of semilinear wave equations in three space dimensions with multiple wave speeds. They generalized the result of Pusateri and Shatah by showing that this system admits a unique global solution for any small and smooth data. Their proof was carried out by the energy method involving a collection of generalized derivatives. The multiple wave speeds disabled the use of the Lorentz boost operators and therefore they applied the method of Klainerman and Sideris. Due to the presence of nonlinear terms violating the standard null condition, some of components of the solution might have a weaker decay as \(t\to\infty\), which made it difficult even to establish a mildly growing bound for high energy estimates. The authors overcame this difficulty by using the ghost weight energy estimate of Alinhac and the Keel-Smith-Sogge type \(L^2\) weighted spacetime estimate for derivatives.