Conservation laws and symmetries of semilinear radial wave equations

Classifications of symmetries and conservation laws are presented for a variety of physically and analytically interesting wave equations with power nonlinearities in n spatial dimensions: a radial hyperbolic equation, a radial Schrödinger equation and its derivative variant, and two proposed radial generalizations of modified Korteweg–de Vries equations, as well as Hamiltonian variants. The mains results classify all admitted local point symmetries and all admitted local conserved densities depending on up to first order spatial derivatives, including any that exist only for special powers or dimensions. All such cases for which these wave equations admit, in particular, dilational energies or conformal energies and inversion symmetries are determined. In addition, potential systems arising from the classified conservation laws are used to determine nonlocal symmetries and nonlocal conserved quantities admitted by these equations. As illustrative applications, a discussion is given of energy norms, conserved Hs norms, critical powers for blow-up solutions, and one-dimensional optimal symmetry groups for invariant solutions. © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.