Global Well-posedness and Asymptotic Analysis of a Damped Nonlinear Wave Equation with a Codimension-One Constraint

Abstract

We prove the global existence and uniqueness of strong solutions to a constrained version of the damped nonlinear wave equation $$ \vartheta_{tt}+γ\vartheta_t-Δ\vartheta+|\vartheta|^{p-2}\vartheta=0 $$ on a smooth bounded domain $\varOmega\subset\mathbb{R}^d$, where the evolution is projected onto the tangent space of the Hilbert manifold $$\mathcal{M} = \left\{ \vartheta\in L^2(\varOmega):\|\vartheta\|_{L^2(\varOmega)}=1 \right\}, $$ which is the unit sphere in $L^2(\varOmega)$. We assume that $$p\in[2,\infty)\ \text{ for }\ d=1,2, \ \text{ while }\ 2\leq p\leq \frac{2(d-1)}{d-2} \ \text{ for }\ d\geq3.$$ By employing the Faedo--Galerkin approximation method, together with suitable a priori estimates and compactness arguments, we establish the global well-posedness of the problem. In particular, we show that the Hilbert manifold $\mathcal{M}$ is invariant under the flow, and hence the $L^2$-constraint is preserved throughout the evolution. Using the \emph{Lusternik--Schnirelmann theory}, we show that the corresponding stationary problem possesses at least countably many stationary solutions. We further investigate the long-time behaviour of solutions and prove that, along a subsequence, every solution of the constrained problem converges to a stationary solution by invoking \emph{Webb's theorem} and \emph{Barbalat's lemma}. When the initial data are sufficiently close to the first eigenfunction of the associated stationary problem, we show that the unique strong solution converges in $H_0^1(\varOmega)$ to the unique positive ground-state solution.