Fuchsian reduction. Applications to geometry, cosmology and mathematical physics (Q885340)

This book describes the method of Fuchsian reduction, which represents solutions of nonlinear PDEs near singularities. This technique has various applications including soliton theory, Einstein's equations and cosmology, stellar models, laser collapse, conformal geometry and combustion. It is used in pure and applied mathematics where numerical computations fail. The book is structured into four parts connecting theory and applications, mostly supported by problems which are solved in the appendix. This book should be used as a text in graduate courses in pure or applied analysis, or as a resource for researchers working with singularities in geometry and mathematical physics. In detail the book is organized as follows. The overview gives an general introduction to the methods used on several examples. A stepwise structure of the techniques, which has to be used to compute the desired results are given. This description gives an interesting and comprehensible outline of the required methods leaving aside all computational problems and detailed proofs of the underlying mathematical theory. The second chapter introduces formal series which include elementary functions to construct solutions of Fuchsian problems. Properties of these series are derived and proved in detail also the properties of the resulting solutions are discussed. Relatives to a representation of \(SL(2)\) are outlined. After that techniques for scalar equations with polynomial dependence of the unknown and its derivatives are described and a detailed treatment for such problems covering applications to nonlinear waves and soliton theory are given. In the fourth chapter the basic existence theorems for complex solutions of Fuchsian PDEs are presented and proved. According to that the singularity data determine unique singular solutions. First the existence of solutions which are continuous in time and analytic in space are derived, while second convergent series solutions in space and time are found, using techniques for iteration in Banach space. The fifth chapter describes the main steps for solving the initial-value problem for Fuchsian systems. The development is modeled on the theory of symmetric hyperbolic systems, which is contained as a special case. Similar in the sixth chapter results for solutions of Fuchsian elliptic boundary-value problems are shown. The application part of the book starts with the use of the reduction method for singularities arising in the modeling of stars, special cases for polytropic and point-source models are shown. Afterwards applications from general relativity relevant in cosmology are discussed. The reduction methods are used to prove mathematically rigorous for Gowdy spacetimes and spacetimes with twist that near the cosmological singularity the time derivatives become more important than the space derivatives. Next, two problems in conformal geometry are solved: the convergence of the ambient metric construction and the regularity of the hyperbolic radius. Detailed proofs permit an inside in the application of the general techniques described in the first chapters. After that the following themes from nonlinear waves are elaborated: semilinear waves, nonlinear optics and lasers, weak detonations, solitons, Liouville equation and Nirenberg's example. In the eleventh chapter variational characterizations of the singular solutions for nonlinear elliptic PDEs with boundary blowup are given, using Hardy's and Trudinger's inequalities. A global bound on the maximal solution is found. In a fourth part properties of the distance function are proved, several characterizations of Hölder spaces are described and the proof of the interior Schauder estimates are carried out. Two forms of the Nash-Moser inverse function theorem in space of analytic functions and in Sobolev spaces are given. Finally the solutions of the various problems in the chapters are given.