Focusing and absorption of nonlinear oscillations
We consider a system of two linear conservative wave equations, with a nonlinear coupling, in space dimension three. Spherical pulse like initial data cause focusing at the origin in the limit of short wavelength. Because the equations are conservative, the caustic crossing is not trivial, and we analyze it for particular initial data. It turns out that the phase shift between the incoming wave (before the focus) and the outgoing wave (past the focus) behaves like , where stands for the wavelength....
We study spherical pulse like families of solutions to semilinear wave equattions in space time of dimension 1+3 as the pulses focus at a point and emerge outgoing. We emphasize the scales for which the incoming and outgoing waves behave linearly but the nonlinearity has a strong effect at the focus. The focus crossing is described by a scattering operator for the semilinear equation, which broadens the pulses. The relative errors in our approximate solutions are small in the L∞ norm.