Local well-posedness for the KdV equation on the half-line at the critical regularity $H^{-\frac34}$

Abstract

We prove local well-posedness for the initial-boundary-value problem for the Korteweg--de Vries equation on the right half-line at the critical regularity $s=-3/4$, with initial and boundary data in $H^{-3/4}(\mathbb R_+)$ and $H^{1/12}(\mathbb R_+)$, respectively. This reaches the endpoint left open in the previous half-line results of Holmer (2006) and Bona, Sun, and Zhang (2006), who established local well-posedness for $s>-3/4$. The proof is based on a contraction argument in the Besov-type Bourgain space introduced by Kishimoto. The main difficulty is to construct a boundary forcing operator compatible with the endpoint $b=1/2$ and the required $\ell^1$-summability in the modulation variable. We construct such an operator using a Laplace-transform representation of the linear half-line problem and a carefully designed extension to $x<0$. The extension combines the required regularity across the boundary with prescribed vanishing spatial moments, yielding favorable low-frequency behavior of the associated kernel. A pointwise kernel estimate then provides the crucial dyadic summability needed for the $X^{-3/4,1/2,1}$ estimate. Together with a time-trace estimate for the Duhamel term at $b=1/2$, this yields the critical local well-posedness result. The ideas used here have prospects to be used in other nonlinear dispersive equations on the half-lines.