Stabilization and control for the subcritical semilinear wave equation

In this paper, we analyze the exponential decay property of solutions of the semilinear wave equation in with a damping term which is effective on the exterior of a ball. Under suitable and natural assumptions on the nonlinearity we prove that the exponential decay holds locally uniformly for finite energy solutions provided the nonlinearity is subcritical at infinity. Subcriticality means, roughly speaking, that the nonlinearity grows at infinity at most as a power p<5. The method of proof combines classical energy estimates for the linear wave equation allowing to estimate the total energy of solutions in terms of the energy localized in the exterior of a ball, Strichartz's estimates and results by P. Gérard on microlocal defect measures and linearizable sequences. We also give an application to the stabilization and controllability of the semilinear wave equation in a bounded domain under the same growth condition on the nonlinearity but provided the nonlinearity has been cut-off away from the boundary.