Scattering for radial energy-subcritical wave equations

Abstract: In this paper, we study the focusing and defocusing energy--subcritical, nonlinear wave equation in $\mathbb{R}^{1+d}$ with radial initial data for $d = 4,5$. We prove that if a solution remains bounded in the critical space on its interval of existence, then the solution exists globally and scatters at $\pm \infty$. The proof follows the concentration compactness/rigidity method initiated by Kenig and Merle, and the main obstacle is to show the nonexistence of nonzero solutions with a certain compactness property. A main novelty of this work is the use of a simple virial argument to rule out the existence of nonzero solutions with this compactness property rather than channels of energy arguments that have been proven to be most useful in odd dimensions.