The top-order energy of quasilinear wave equations in two space dimensions is uniformly bounded

Abstract: Alinhac solved a long-standing open problem in 2001 and established that quasilinear wave equations in two space dimensions with quadratic null nonlinearities admit global-in-time solutions, provided that the initial data are compactly supported and sufficiently small in Sobolev norm. In this work, Alinhac obtained an upper bound with polynomial growth in time for the top-order energy of the solutions. A natural question then arises whether the time-growth is a true phenomena, despite the possible conservation of basic energy. Analogous problems are also of central importance for Schr\"odinger equations and the incompressible Euler equations in two space dimensions, as studied by Bourgain, Colliander-Keel-Staffilani-Takaoka-Tao, Kiselev-Sverak, and others. In the present paper, we establish that the top-order energy of the solutions in Alinhac theorem remains globally bounded in time, which is opposite to Alinhac's blowup-at-infinity conjecture.