Low regularity ill-posedness for elastic waves driven by shock formation

Abstract: In this paper, we construct counterexamples to the local existence of low-regularity solutions to elastic wave equations in three spatial dimensions (3D). Inspired by the recent works of Christodoulou, we generalize Lindblad's classic results on the scalar wave equation by showing that the Cauchy problem for 3D elastic waves, a physical system with multiple wave-speeds, is ill-posed in $H^3(\mathbb{R}^3)$. We further prove that the ill-posedness is caused by instantaneous shock formation, which is characterized by the vanishing of the inverse foliation density. The main difficulties of the 3D case come from the multiple wave-speeds and its associated non-strict hyperbolicity. We obtain the desired results by designing and combining a geometric approach and an algebraic approach, equipped with detailed studies and calculations of the structures and coefficients of the corresponding non-strictly hyperbolic system. Moreover, the ill-posedness we depict also applies to 2D elastic waves, which corresponds to a strictly hyperbolic case.