Solutions with prescribed local blow-up surface for the nonlinear wave equation

Abstract: We prove that any sufficiently differentiable space-like hypersurface of ${\mathbb R}^{1+N} $ coincides locally around any of its points with the blow-up surface of a finite-energy solution of the focusing nonlinear wave equation $\partial_{tt} u - \Delta u=|u|^{p-1} u$ on ${\mathbb R} \times {\mathbb R} ^N$, for any $1\leq N\leq 4$ and $1 < p \le \frac {N+2} {N-2}$. We follow the strategy developed in our previous work [arXiv 1812.03949] on the construction of solutions of the nonlinear wave equation blowing up at any prescribed compact set. Here to prove blowup on a local space-like hypersurface, we first apply a change of variable to reduce the problem to blowup on a small ball at $t=0$ for a transformed equation. The construction of an appropriate approximate solution is then combined with an energy method for the existence of a solution of the transformed problem that blows up at $t=0$. To obtain a finite-energy solution of the original problem from trace arguments, we need to work with $H^2\times H^1$ solutions for the transformed problem.