This talk gives a brief review of some recent progress in the asymptotic analysis of short pulse solutions of nonlinear hyperbolic partial differential equations. This includes descriptions on the scales of geometric optics and diffractive geometric optics, and also studies of special situations where pulses passing through focal points can be analysed.
We prove two new results about the Cauchy problem in the energy space for nonlinear Schrödinger equations on four-dimensional compact manifolds. The first one concerns global well-posedness for Hartree-type nonlinearities and includes approximations of cubic NLS on the sphere as a particular case. The second one provides, in the case of zonal data on the sphere, local well-posedness for quadratic nonlinearities as well as a necessary and sufficient condition of global well-posedness for small energy...