Sharp well-posedness results for the generalized Benjamin-Ono equation with high nonlinearity

Abstract

We establish the local well-posedness of the generalized Benjamin-Ono equation $\partial_tu+\mathcal{H}\partial_x^2u\pm u^k\partial_xu=0$ in $H^s(\R)$, $s>1/2-1/k$ for $k\geq 12$ and without smallness assumption on the initial data. The condition $s>1/2-1/k$ is known to be sharp since the solution map $u_0\mapsto u$ is not of class $\mathcal{C}^{k+1}$ on $H^s(\R)$ for $s<1/2-1/k$. On the other hand, in the particular case of the cubic Benjamin-Ono equation, we prove the ill-posedness in $H^s(\R)$, $s<1/3$.