Nonlinear Wave Equations With Null Condition On Extremal Reissner-Nordstr\"om Spacetimes I: Spherical Symmetry

Abstract

We study spherically symmetric solutions of semilinear wave equations in the case where the nonlinearity satisfies the null condition on extremal Reissner--Nordstrom black hole spacetimes. We show that solutions which arise from sufficiently small compactly supported smooth data prescribed on a Cauchy hypersfurace \widetilde{{\Sigma}}_0 crossing the future event horizon \mathcal{H}^{+} are globally well-posed in the domain of outer communications up to and including \mathcal{H}^{+}. Our method allows us to close all bootstrap estimates under very weak decay results (compatible with those known for the linear case). Moreover we establish a certain number of non-decay and blow-up results along the horizon \mathcal{H}^{+} which generalize known instability results for the linear case. Our results apply to spherically symmetric wave maps for a wide class of target spaces.