On the asymptotic behavior of nonlinear waves in the presence of a short-range potential

Abstract

Consider the nonlinear wave equation with zero mass and a time-independent potential in three space dimensions. When it comes to the associated Cauchy problem, it is already known that short-range potentials do not affect the existence of small-amplitude solutions. In this paper, we focus on the associated scattering problem and we show that the situation is quite different there. In particular, we show that even arbitrarily small and rapidly decaying potentials may affect the asymptotic behavior of solutions.