Dynamics near explicit stationary solutions in similarity variables for solutions of a semilinear wave equation in higher dimensions

Abstract: This is the first of two papers devoted to the study of the properties of the blow-up surface for the $N$ dimensional semilinear wave equation with subconformal power nonlinearity. In a series of papers, we have clarified the situation in one space dimension. Our goal here is to extend some of the properties to higher dimension. In dimension one, an essential tool was to study the dynamics of the solution in similarity variables, near the set of non-zero equilibria, which are obtained by a Lorentz transform of the space-independent solution. As a matter of fact, the main part of this paper is to study similar objects in higher dimensions. More precisely, near that set of equilibria, we show that solutions are either non-global, or go to zero, or converge to some explicit equilibrium. We also show that the first case cannot occur in the characteristic case, and that only the third possibility occurs in the non-characteristic case, thanks to the non-degeneracy of the blow-up limit, another new result in our paper. As a by-product of our techniques, we obtain the stability of the zero solution.