Energy estimates for the good-bad-ugly model

Abstract

We establish a relationship between the equations that constitute the so-called good-bad-ugly model, whose nonlinearities are known to mimic those present in the Einstein field equations in generalized harmonic gauge. This relationship between ugly fields and good and bad ones stems from the fact that one can write the equation for the rescaled derivative of an ugly along an incoming null direction as a good or a bad equation depending on whether there are source terms or not. This provides a new interpretation of the logarithms of the radial coordinate that show up in expansions of solutions to ugly equations near null infinity. This furthermore allows us to use the Klainerman-Sobolev inequality for the standard wave equation on Cauchy slices to show uniform boundedness for the ugly equation. In the second part of this paper we perform a first order reduction of the ugly equation with given sources in flat space and we radially compactify the coordinates in order to show an energy estimate for that equation on hyperboloidal slices. This result is an important first step towards establishing energy estimates for the hyperboloidal initial value problem of the first order compactified Einstein field equations in generalized harmonic gauge.