On hyperbolicity and Gevrey well-posedness. Part three: a class of weakly hyperbolic systems

Abstract

We consider a class of weakly hyperbolic systems of first-order, nonlinear PDEs. Weak hyperbolicity means here that the principal symbol of the system has a crossing of eigenvalues, and is not uniformly diagonalizable. We prove the well-posedness of the Cauchy problem in the Gevrey regularity for all Gevrey indices greater than $1/2$. The proof is based on the construction of a suitable approximate symmetrizer of the principal symbol and an energy estimate in Gevrey spaces. We discuss both the generality of the assumption on the structure of the principal symbol and the sharpness of the lower bound of the Gevrey index.