Concentration compactness for critical radial wave maps

We consider radially symmetric, energy critical wave maps from (1 + 2)-dimensional Minkowski space into the unit sphere $\mathbf{S}^m$, m≥1, and prove global regularity and scattering for classical smooth data of finite energy. In addition, we establish a priori bounds on a suitable scattering norm of the radial wave maps and exhibit concentration compactness properties of sequences of radial wave maps with uniformly bounded energies. This extends and complements the beautiful classical work of Christodoulou-Tahvildar-Zadeh [3, 4] and Struwe [31, 33] as well as of Nahas [22] on radial wave maps in the case of the unit sphere as the target. The proof is based upon the concentration compactness/rigidity method of Kenig-Merle [6, 7] and a “twisted” Bahouri-Gérard type profile decomposition [1], following the implementation of this strategy by the second author and Schlag [17] for energy critical wave maps into the hyperbolic plane as well as by the last two authors [16] for the energy critical Maxwell-Klein-Gordon equation.