Renormalization and blow up for charge one equivariant critical wave maps

Abstract

We prove the existence of equivariant finite time blow up solutions for the wave map problem from 2+1 dimensions into the 2-sphere. These solutions are the sum of a dynamically rescaled ground-state harmonic map plus a radiation term. The local energy of the latter tends to zero as time approaches blow up time. This is accomplished by first "renormalizing" the rescaled ground state harmonic map profile by solving an elliptic equation, followed by a perturbative analysis.