Low regularity solutions of two fifth-order KDV type equations

The Kawahara and modified Kawahara equations are fifth-order KdV type equations that have been derived to model many physical phenomena such as gravity-capillary waves and magneto-sound propagation in plasmas. This paper establishes the local well-posedness of the initial-value problem for the Kawahara equation in H ^s (R) with s ≥ − 7/4 and the local well-posedness for the modified Kawahara equation in H ^s (R) with s ≥ − 1/4. To prove these results, we derive a fundamental estimate on dyadic blocks for the Kawahara equation through the k; Z]_multiplier norm method of Tao 14] and use this to obtain new bilinear and trilinear estimates in suitable Bourgain spaces.