Sharp ill-posedness for the Hunter–Saxton equation on the line

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to give an exact division for the well-posedness and ill-posedness (non-existence) of the Hunter–Saxton equation on the line. Since the force term is not bounded in the classical Besov spaces (even in the classical Sobolev spaces), a new mixed space \(\mathcal {B}\) is constructed to overcome this difficulty. More precisely, if the initial data \(u_0\in \mathcal {B}\cap \dot{H}^{1}(\mathbb {R}),\) the local well-posedness of the Cauchy problem for the Hunter–Saxton equation is established in this space. Contrariwise, if \(u_0\in \mathcal {B}\) but \(u_0\notin \dot{H}^{1}(\mathbb {R}),\) the norm inflation and hence the ill-posedness is presented. It’s worth noting that this norm inflation occurs in the low frequency part, which exactly leads to a non-existence result. Moreover, the above result clarifies a corollary with physical significance such that all the smooth solutions in \(L^{\infty }(0,T;L^{\infty }(\mathbb {R}))\) must have the \(\dot{H}^1\) norm.