ON THE EQUATION $\square\phi =|\nabla \phi |^2$ IN FOUR SPACE DIMENSIONS

This paper considers the following Cauchy problem for semilinear wave equations in $n$ space dimensions $$\align \square\p &=F(\partial\p ),\\p (0,x)&=f(x),\quad \partial_t\p (0,x)=g(x), \endalign$$ where $\square =\partial_t^2-\triangle$ is the wave operator, $F$ is quadratic in $\partial\p$ with $\partial =(\partial_t,\partial_{x_1},\cdots ,\partial_{x_n})$. The minimal value of $s$ is determined such that the above Cauchy problem is locally well-posed in $H^s$. It turns out that for the general equation $s$ must satisfy $$s>\max\Big(\frac{n}{2}, \frac{n+5}{4}\Big).$$ This is due to Ponce and Sideris (when $n=3$) and Tataru (when $n\ge 5$). The purpose of this paper is to supplement with a proof in the case $n=2,4$.