We prove almost global well-posedness for quasilinear strongly coupled wave-Klein-Gordon systems with small and localized data in two space dimensions. We assume only mild decay on the data at infinity as well as minimal regularity. We systematically investigate all the possible quadratic null form type quasilinear strong coupling nonlinearities.

A key feature of the paper is our new, robust approach to the vector field method, which enables us to work at minimal regularity and decay in a quasilinear setting, and which, we believe, can be applied for a much wider class of problems.

We study the timelike asymptotics for global solutions to a scalar quasilinear wave equation satisfying the weak null condition. Given a global solution u to the scalar wave equation with sufficiently small $C_c^\infty $ initial data, we derive an asymptotic formula for this global solution inside the light cone (i.e. for $|x|<t$). It involves the scattering data obtained in the author’s asymptotic completeness result in [75]. Using this asymptotic formula, we prove that u must vanish under some decaying assumptions on u or its scattering data, provided that the wave equation violates the null condition.

The article studies inverse problems of determining unknown coefficients in various semi-linear and quasi-linear wave equations given the knowledge of an associated source-to-solution map. We introduce a method to solve inverse problems for nonlinear equations using interaction of three waves that makes it possible to study the inverse problem in all globally hyperbolic spacetimes of the dimension $n+1\geqslant 3$ and with partial data. We consider the case when the set $\Omega _{\mathrm{in}}$, where the sources are supported, and the set $\Omega _{\mathrm{out}}$, where the observations are made, are separated. As model problems we study both a quasi-linear equation and a semi-linear wave equation and show in each case that it is possible to uniquely recover the background metric up to the natural obstructions for uniqueness that is governed by finite speed of propagation for the wave equation and a gauge corresponding to change of coordinates. The proof consists of two independent components. In the geometric part of the article we introduce a novel geometrical object, the three-to-one scattering relation. We show that this relation determines uniquely the topological, differential and conformal structures of the Lorentzian manifold in a causal diamond set that is the intersection of the future of the point $p_{in}\in \Omega _{\mathrm{in}}$ and the past of the point $p_{out}\in \Omega _{\mathrm{out}}$. In the analytic part of the article we study multiple-fold linearisation of the nonlinear wave equation using Gaussian beams. We show that the source-to-solution map, corresponding to sources in $\Omega _{\mathrm{in}}$ and observations in $\Omega _{\mathrm{out}}$, determines the three-to-one scattering relation. The methods developed in the article do not require any assumptions on the conjugate or cut points.

We prove that any simple planar travelling wave solution to the membrane equation in spatial dimension $d\geqslant 3$ with bounded spatial extent is globally nonlinearly stable under sufficiently small compactly supported perturbations, where the smallness depends on the size of the support of the perturbation as well as on the initial travelling wave profile. The main novelty of the argument is the lack of higher order peeling in our vector-field-based method. In particular, the higher order energies (in fact, all energies at order $2$ or higher) are allowed to grow polynomially (but in a controlled way) in time. This is in contrast with classical global stability arguments, where only the ‘top’ order energies used in the bootstrap argument exhibit growth, and reflects the fact that the background travelling wave solution has ‘infinite energy’ and the coefficients of the perturbation equation are not asymptotically Lorentz invariant. Nonetheless, we can prove that the perturbation converges to zero in $C^{2}$ by carefully analysing the nonlinear interactions and exposing a certain ‘vestigial’ null structure in the equations.