Energy decay for the linear and semilinear wave equations in exterior domains with some localized dissipations (Q5956856)

The initial-boundary value problem for the damped wave equation \[ \begin{aligned} u_{tt}(x,t)- \Delta u(x,t)+ a(x)u(x,t) & =0\text{ for }(x,t)\in \Omega\times] 0,\infty[,\;u(x,t)= 0\text{ for }(x,t)\in\partial \Omega\times] 0,\infty[,\\ u(x,0) & =u_0(x)\text{ for }x\in\Omega,\\ u_t(x,0) & =u_1(x)\text{ for } x\in\Omega, \end{aligned} \] is considered in an exterior domain \(\Omega\), i.e. a domain with compact complement \(\mathbb{R}^N\setminus\Omega\), with smooth boundary \(\partial\Omega\). It is assumed that \(a\) is nonnegative, bounded, measurable and strictly positive outside of a certain ball and up to the boundary in a relatively open neighborhood of \(\{x\in\partial \Omega|(x-x_0)\cdot \nu(x)>0\}\) in \(\overline\Omega\). Under these mild assumptions the author shows uniform \(L^2(\Omega)\)-boundedness of the solution \(u(\cdot,t)\) at time \(t\in]0, \infty[\) and total energy decay \(E(t)\leq{C_0 \over 1+t}E(0)\) for \(t\in]0,\infty[\) and some uniform constant \(C_0>0\). The decay result is then applied to obtain a global existence result for small data for the corresponding semilinear problem with a source term \(f(u)\) satisfying the constraints \[ \bigl|f(u)\bigr|\leq k_0|u|^{\alpha+1},\;\bigl |f(u)-f(v) \bigr|\leq k_0\bigl(|u|+|v|\bigr)^\alpha |u-v|\text{ for all } u,v\in\mathbb{R}, \] for some \(k_0>0\) and \(\alpha>0\).