We prove a full asymptotic stability result for solitary wave solutions of the mKdV equation. We consider small perturbations of solitary waves with polynomial decay at infinity and prove that solutions of the Cauchy problem evolving from such data tend uniformly, on the real line, to another solitary wave as time goes to infinity. We describe precisely the asymptotics of the perturbation behind the solitary wave showing that it satisfies a nonlinearly modified scattering behavior. This latter part of our result relies on a precise study of the asymptotic behavior of small solutions of the mKdV equation. R u dx.(1.2) As we will remark later, these are not needed to prove the small data result, which also applies to more general versions of (mKdV). 1 2 PIERRE GERMAIN, FABIO PUSATERI, AND FRÉDÉRIC ROUSSETMoreover, we note that solutions of (mKdV) enjoy the scaling symmetry u −→ λu(λ 3 t, λx), which is generated by the vector field S = 1 + x∂ x + 3t∂ t .
Known results.Global well-posedness and asymptotic behavior. There is a vast body of literature dealing with the mKdV equation, and in particular with the local and global well-posedness of the Cauchy problem. Without trying to be exhaustive, we mention the early works on the local and global well-posedness by Kenig-Ponce-Vega [29] and Kato [27]. Global well-posedness in low regularity spaces, and in particular in the energy space H 1 , was established in the seminal work of Kenig-Ponce-Vega [30]. In this latter paper the authors considered the wider class of generalized KdV (gKdV) equations ∂ t u + ∂ 3x u + ∂ x u p = 0, p ≥ 2, which includes (mKdV) and the KdV equation (p = 2). Sharp, up to the end-point, global well-posedness in H s for s > 1/4 was proved in the work of Colliander-Keel-Staffilani-Takaoka-Tao [7], for both the focusing and defocusing mKdV equation on the line (and for s ≥ 1/2 in the periodic case). These results are complemented by several ill-posedness results; see for example Christ-Colliander-Tao [6] and references therein. 2 Besides global regularity, another fundamental question for dispersive PDEs concerns the asymptotic behavior for large times. The first proof of global existence with a complete description of the asymptotic behavior of solutions of (mKdV) in the defocusing case, is due to Deift and Zhou [9], who used a steepest descent approach to oscillatory Riemann-Hilbert problems and the inverse scattering transform [52,2]. In [9], thanks to the complete integrability of the defocusing mKdV equation, the authors were able to treat suitably localized initial data with arbitrary size. A proof of global existence and a (partial) derivation of the asymptotic behavior for small localized solutions, without making use of complete integrability, was later given by Hayashi and Naumkin [18,19], following the ideas introduced in the context of the 1d nonlinear Schrödinger (NLS) equation in [17]. Recently, an alternative proof of the results in [19], with a precise derivation of asymptotics and a proof of asymptotic completeness, was given by Har...