No abstract

In an influential 1964 article, P. Lax studied 2 × 2 genuinely nonlinear strictly hyperbolic PDE systems (in one spatial dimension). Using the method of Riemann invariants, he showed that a large set of smooth initial data lead to bounded solutions whose first spatial derivatives blow up in finite time, a phenomenon known as wave breaking. In the present article, we study the Cauchy problem for two classes of quasilinear wave equations in two spatial dimensions that are closely related to the systems studied by Lax. When the data have one-dimensional symmetry, Lax's methods can be applied to the wave equations to show that a large set of smooth initial data lead to wave breaking. Here we study solutions with initial data that are close, as measured by an appropriate Sobolev norm, to data belonging to a distinguished subset of Lax's data: the data corresponding to simple plane waves. Our main result is that under suitable relative smallness assumptions, the Lax-type wave breaking for simple plane waves is stable. The key point is that we allow the data perturbations to break the symmetry. Moreover, we give a detailed, constructive description of the asymptotic behavior of the solution all the way up to the first singularity, which is a shock driven by the intersection of null (characteristic) hyperplanes. We also outline how to extend our results to the compressible irrotational Euler equations. To derive our results, we use Christodoulou's framework for studying shock formation to treat a new solution regime in which wave dispersion is not present.

This is the first and main paper of a two-part series, in which we prove the C 2 -formulation of the strong cosmic censorship conjecture for the Einstein-Maxwell-(real)-scalar-field system in spherical symmetry for two-ended asymptotically flat data. For this model, it is known through the works of Dafermos and Dafermos-Rodnianski that the maximal globally hyperbolic future development of any admissible twoended asymptotically flat Cauchy initial data set possesses a non-empty Cauchy horizon, across which the spacetime is C 0 -future-extendible (in particular, the C 0 -formulation of the strong cosmic censorship conjecture is false). Nevertheless, the main conclusion of the present series of papers is that for a generic (in the sense of being open and dense relative to appropriate topologies) class of such data, the spacetime is future-inextendible with a Lorentzian metric of higher regularity (specifically, C 2 ).In this paper, we prove that the solution is C 2 -future-inextendible under the condition that the scalar field obeys an L 2 -averaged polynomial lower bound along each of the event horizons. This, in particular, improves upon a previous result of Dafermos, which required instead a pointwise lower bound. Key to the proof are appropriate stability and instability results in the interior of the black hole region, whose proofs are in turn based on ideas from the work of Dafermos-Luk on the stability of the Kerr Cauchy horizon (without symmetry) and from our previous paper on linear instability of Reissner-Nordström Cauchy horizon. In the second paper of the series [36], which concerns analysis in the exterior of the black hole region, we show that the L 2 -averaged polynomial lower bound needed for the instability result indeed holds for a generic class of admissible two-ended asymptotically flat Cauchy initial data.