The threshold of effective damping for semilinear wave equations

In this paper, we obtain the global existence of small data solutions to the Cauchy problem utt−Δu+μ1+tut=|u|pu(0,x)=u0(x),ut(0,x)=u1(x) in space dimension n ≥ 1, for p > 1 + 2 ∕ n, where μ is sufficiently large. We obtain estimates for the solution and its energy with the same decay rate of the linear problem. In particular, for μ ≥ 2 + n, the damping term is effective with respect to the L1 − L2 low-frequency estimates for the solution and its energy. In this case, we may prove global existence in any space dimension n ≥ 3, by assuming smallness of the initial data in some weighted energy space. In space dimension n = 1,2, we only assume smallness of the data in some Sobolev spaces, and we introduce an approach based on fractional Sobolev embedding to improve the threshold for global existence to μ ≥ 5 ∕ 3 in space dimension n = 1 and to μ ≥ 3 in space dimension n = 2. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.