No label defined (Q4366337)

We investigate the global existence and decay of solutions to the initial-boundary value problem for the quasilinear wave equation which a viscosity and a nonlinear perturbation: \[ \begin{cases} u_{tt}- \text{div}\{\sigma(|\nabla u|^2)\nabla u\}- \Delta u_t+ g(u)= 0\quad\text{in }[0,\infty)\times \Omega,\\ u(0, x)= u_0(x),\;u_t(0, x)= u_1(x)\text{ and }u\bigl|_{\partial\Omega}= 0,\end{cases}\tag{P} \] where \(\Omega\) is a bounded domain in \(\mathbb{R}^N\). As nonlinearities we treat, for example, \(\sigma(v^2)= 1/\sqrt{1+ v^2}\) and \(g(u)= -|u|^\alpha u\). The object of this paper is to combine the method in [\textit{M. Nakao}, Math. Z. 219, No. 2, 289-299 (1995; Zbl 0835.35094)] with a concept of stable set to prove the global existence of the problem (P). The main difficulty in our problem lies in the fact that the operator \(-\text{div}\{\sigma(|\nabla u|^2)\nabla u\}\) is not coercive. To overcome this difficulty, we treat the so-called \(H_2\)-solutions instead of usual energy finite solutions and derive a precise decay estimate for the energy. We note that our restriction on the growth order \(\alpha\) is weaker than the usual one. Indeed, when \(\sigma(v^2)\equiv 1\), we can take \(0<\alpha< 4/(N- 4)^+\), which is much weaker than the usual restriction \(0<\alpha< 4/(N- 2)^+\). Finally, we note that our method can be applied to another typical nonlinearity \(\sigma(v^2)= |v|^p\), \(p>0\), and yields a new existence theorem of global solutions.