Life-span of solutions to semilinear wave equation with time-dependent critical damping for specially localized initial data

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the blowup phenomena for initial value problem of semilinear wave equation with critical time-dependent damping term (DW). The result is the sharp upper bound of lifespan of solution with respect to the small parameter $\ep$ when $p_F(N)\leq p\leq p_0(N+\mu)$, where $p_F(N)$ denotes the Fujita exponent for the nonlinear heat equations and $p_0(n)$ denotes the Strauss exponent for nonlinear wave equation in $n$-dimension with $\mu=0$. Consequently, by connecting the result of D'Abbicco--Lucente--Reissig 2015, our result clarifies the threshold exponent $p_0(N+\mu)$ for dividing blowup phenomena and global existence of small solutions when $N=3$. The crucial idea is to construct suitable test functions satisfying the conjugate linear equation $\pa_t^2\Phi-\Delta \Phi-\pa_t(\frac{\mu}{1+t}\Phi)=0$ of (DW) including the Gauss hypergeometric functions; note that the construction of test functions is different from Zhou--Han in 2014.