The sine Gordon equation in light-cone coordinates on the half lines revisited: a Riemann--Hilbert approach

Abstract

In this work, we study the initial boundary value (IBV) problems for the sine-Gordon (sG) equation in the light-cone coordinates $u_{xt}=\sin u$ in the quarter planes $x> 0$, $t>0$ and $x< 0$, $t>0$ assuming a suitable decay as $x\to +\infty$ or as $x\to -\infty$. Employing the Riemann--Hilbert (RH) problem framework, we demonstrate that these two IBV problems differ significantly with respect to the boundary data required for well-posedness. Specifically, the solution of the ``right problem'' ($x\ge 0$) is uniquely determined by the initial data $u(x,0)$, $x\ge 0$ alone whereas for the ``left problem'' ($x\le 0$), the boundary data $u(0,t)$ has to be prescribed in addition to the initial data in order to obtain a well-posed problem.