Cascade of Phase Shifts and Creation of Nonlinear Focal Points for Supercritical Semiclassical Hartree Equation

Abstract

We consider the semiclassical limit of the Hartree equation with a data causing a focusing at a point. We study the asymptotic behavior of phase function associated with the WKB approximation near the caustic when a nonlinearity is supercritical. In this case, it is known that a phase shift occurs in a neighborhood of focusing time in the case of focusing cubic nonlinear Schrödinger equation. Thanks to the smoothness of the nonlocal nonlinearities, we justify the WKB-type approximation of the solution for a data which is larger than in the previous results and is not necessarily well-prepared. We also show by an analysis of the limit hydrodynamical equaiton that, however, this WKB-type approximation breaks down before reaching the focal point: Nonlinear effects lead to the formation of singularity of the leading term of the phase function.