Well-posedness issues on the periodic modified Kawahara equation

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the Cauchy problem of the modified Kawahara equation (posed on $\mathbb{T}$), which is well-known as a model of capillary-gravity waves in an infinitely long canal over a flat bottom in a long wave regime [26]. We show in this paper some well-posedness results, mainly the global well-posedness in $L^2(\mathbb{T})$. The proof basically relies on the idea introduced in Takaoka-Tsutsumi's works [60,69], which weakens the non-trivial resonance in the cubic interactions (a kind of smoothing effect) for the local result, and the global well-posedness result immediately follows from $L^2$ conservation law. An immediate application of Takaoka-Tsutsumi's idea is available only in $H^s(\mathbb{T})$, $s>0$, due to the lack of $L^4$-Strichartz estimate for arbitrary $L^2$ data, a slight modification, thus, is needed to attain the local well-posedness in $L^2(\mathbb{T})$. This is the first low regularity (global) well-posedness result for the periodic modified Kwahara equation, as far as we know. A direct interpolation argument ensures the unconditional uniqueness in $H^s(\mathbb{T})$, $s>\frac{1}{2}$, and as a byproduct, we show the weak ill-posedness below $H^{\frac{1}{2}}(\mathbb{T})$, in the sense that the flow map fails to be uniformly continuous.