Paper detail

Universality of blow up profile for small blow up solutions to the energy critical wave map equation

In this paper we introduce the channel of energy argument to the study of energy critical wave maps into the sphere. More precisely, we prove a channel of energy type inequality for small energy wave maps, and as an application we show that for a wave map that has energy just above the degree one harmonic maps and that blows up in finite time, the solution asymptotically de-couples into a regular part plus a traveling wave with small momentum, in the energy space. In particular, the only possible form of energy concentration is through the concentration of traveling waves. This is often called quantization of energy at blow up. We also give a brief review of important background results in the subcritical and critical regularity theory for the two dimensional wave maps.