Almost Global Existence for 4-Dimensional Quasilinear Wave Equations in Exterior Domains

Abstract: This article focuses on almost global existence for quasilinear wave equations with small initial data in 4-dimensional exterior domains. The nonlinearity is allowed to depend on the solution at the quadratic level as well as its first and second derivatives. For this problem in the boundaryless setting, H\"{o}rmander proved that the lifespan is bounded below by $\exp(c/\epsilon)$ where $\epsilon>0$ denotes the size of the Cauchy data. Later Du, the second author, Sogge, and Zhou showed that this inequality also holds for star-shaped obstacles. Following up on the authors' work in the 3-dimensional case, we weaken the hypothesis on the geometry and only require that the obstacle allow for a sufficiently rapid decay of local energy for the linear homogeneous wave equation. The key innovation of this paper is the use of the boundary term estimates of the second author and Sogge in conjunction with a variant of an estimate of Klainerman and Sideris, which will be obtained via a Sobolev inequality of Du and Zhou.