A construction of blow up solutions for co-rotational wave maps (Q609539)

Let \(N\) be a compact surface of revolution, with Riemannian metric \(ds^2=d\rho^2+g(\rho)^2 d\theta^2\), \(g\) an entire function. Co-rotational wave maps from \(\mathbb{R}^{2+1}\) into \(N\) are of the form \((t, r, \theta) \rightarrow (u(t, r ), \theta)\), where \(u\) satisfies the following equation: \[ -\partial_t^2 u + \partial^2_r u +\frac{1}{r}\partial_r u =\frac{g(u)g'(u)}{r^2} . \] The existence of co-rotational finite time blow up solutions to this problem is proven. These are of the form \(u(t, r ) = Q(\lambda(t)r)+R(t, r)\), where \(Q\) is a time independent solution of the co-rotational wave map equation (more precisely, \(Q\) is the solution of \(r\partial_r Q=g(Q)\), \(Q(1)=1\)), \(\lambda (t) = t^{-1-\nu}\), \(\nu > 1/2\) is arbitrary, and \(R\) is a term whose local energy goes to zero as \(t\rightarrow 0\). In particular, the equation has blow up solutions (solutions for which the \(\|\partial_{t,r} u\|_{L^2_x}\) norm goes to infinity in finite time) with initial data \((u, \partial_t u)\) in \(H^{1+\delta}\times H^{\delta}\), for some \(\delta > 0\). The proof of the main result follows very closely the work of \textit{J. Krieger, W. Schlag}, and \textit{D. Tataru} [Invent. Math. 171, No. 3, 543--615 (2008; Zbl 1139.35021)] in the particular case when the surface of revolution \(N\) is the sphere.