Shock formation in small-data solutions to 3D quasilinear wave equations

In 1848 James Challis showed that smooth solutions to the compressible Euler equations can become multivalued, thus signifying the onset of a shock singularity. Today it is known that, for many hyperbolic systems, such singularities often develop. However, most shock-formation results have been proved only in one spatial dimension. Serge Alinhac's groundbreaking work on wave equations in the late 1990s was the first to treat more than one spatial dimension. In 2007, for the compressible Euler equations in vorticity-free regions, Demetrios Christodoulou remarkably sharpened Alinhac's results and gave a complete description of shock formation. In this monograph, Christodoulou's framework is extended to two classes of wave equations in three spatial dimensions. It is shown that if the nonlinear terms fail to satisfy the null condition, then for small data, shocks are the only possible singularities that can develop. Moreover, the author exhibits an open set of small data whose solutions form a shock, and he provides a sharp description of the blow-up. These results yield a sharp converse of the fundamental result of Christodoulou and Klainerman, who showed that small-data solutions are global when the null condition is satisfied. Readers who master the material will have acquired tools on the cutting edge of PDEs, fluid mechanics, hyperbolic conservation laws, wave equations, and geometric analysis