Uniqueness and non-uniqueness of the Gaussian free field evolution under the two-dimensional Wick ordered cubic wave equation

Abstract

We study the nonlinear wave equation (NLW) on the two-dimensional torus $\mathbb T^2$ with Gaussian random initial data on $H^s(\mathbb T^2) \times H^{s-1}(\mathbb T^2)$, $s < 0$, distributed according to the base Gaussian free field $\mu$ associated with the invariant Gibbs measure studied by Thomann and the first author (2020). In particular, we investigate the approximation property of the corresponding solution by smooth (random) solutions. Our main results in this paper are two-fold. (i) We show that the solution map for the renormalized cubic NLW defined on the Gaussian free field $\mu$ is the unique extension of the solution map defined for smoothed Gaussian initial data obtained by mollification, independent of mollification kernels. (ii) We also show that there is a regularization of the Gaussian initial data so that the corresponding smooth solutions almost surely have no limit in the natural topology. This second result in particular states that one can not use arbitrary smooth approximation for the renormalized cubic NLW dynamics. As a preliminary step for proving (ii), we establish a (deterministic) norm inflation result at general initial data for the (unrenormalized) cubic NLW on $\mathbb T^d$ and $\mathbb R^d$ in negative Sobolev spaces, extending the norm inflation result by Christ, Colliander, and Tao (2003).