Global Pointwise Decay Estimates for Defocusing Radial Nonlinear Wave Equations

We prove global pointwise decay estimates for a class of defocusing semilinear wave equations in n = 3 dimensions restricted to spherical symmetry. The technique is based on a conformal transformation and a suitable choice of the mapping adjusted to the nonlinearity. As a result we obtain a pointwise bound on the solutions for arbitrarily large Cauchy data, provided the solutions exist globally. The decay rates are identical with those for small data and hence seem to be optimal. A generalization beyond the spherical symmetry is suggested.