Energy solutions for the fifth-order modified Korteweg de-Vries equations

TL;DR

This paper proves the global well-posedness of the periodic fifth-order mKdV equation in the energy space by introducing a novel frequency-dependent short-time space and weighted energy methods, addressing the lack of smoothing effects.

Contribution

It establishes global well-posedness for the periodic fifth-order mKdV in $H^2$ using a new short-time space and weighted energy estimates, advancing previous results.

Findings

Global well-posedness in $H^2$ space.

Flow map is not $C^3$, indicating quasilinear behavior.

Introduces a frequency-dependent short-time space and weighted energy techniques.

Abstract

We consider the Cauchy problem for the fifth-order modified Korteweg-de Vries equation (mKdV) under the periodic boundary condition. The fifth-order mKdV is an asymptotic model for shallow surface waves, and (in the perspective of integrable systems) the second equation in the mKdV hierarchy as well. In strong contrast with the non-periodic case, periodic solutions for dispersive equations do not have a (local) smoothing effect, and this observation becomes a major obstacle to considering the Cauchy problem for dispersive equations under the periodic condition, consequently, the periodic fifth-order mKdV shows a quasilinear phenomenon, while the non-periodic case can be considered as a semilinear equation. In this paper, we mainly establish the global well-posedness of the fifth-order mKdV in the energy space ($H^2(\mathbb T)$), which is an improvement of the former result by the first author (2018). The main idea to overcome the lack of (local) smoothing effect is to introduce a suitable (frequency dependent) short-time space originally motivated by the work by Ionescu, Kenig, and Tataru (2008). The new idea is to combine the (frequency) localized modified energy with additional weight in the spaces, which eventually handles the logarithmic divergence appearing in the energy estimates. Moreover, by using examples localized in low and very high frequencies, we show that the flow map of the fifth-order mKdV equation is not $C^3$, which implies that the Picard iterative method is not available for the local theory. This weakly concludes the quasilinear phenomenon of the periodic fifth-order mKdV.