Instability of the periodic nonlinear Schrodinger equation

Abstract

We study the periodic non-linear Schrodinger equations with odd integer power nonlinearities, for initial data which are assumed to be small in some negative order Sobolev space, but which may have large L^2 mass. These equations are known to be illposed in H^s for all negative s, in the sense that the solution map fails to be uniformly continuous from H^s to itself, even for short times and small norms. Here we show that these equations are even more unstable. For the cubic equation, the solution map is discontinuous from H^s to even the space of distributions. For the quintic and higher order nonlinearities, there exist pairs of solutions which are uniformly bounded in H^s, are arbitrarily close in any C^N norm at time zero, and fail to be close in the distribution topology at an arbitrarily small positive time.