We undertake a systematic review of results proved in [26,27,30,31,32] concerning local well-posedness of the Cauchy problem for certain systems of nonlinear wave equations, with minimal regularity assumptions on the initial data. Moreover we give a considerably simplified and unified treatment of these results and provide also complete proofs for large data. The paper is also intended as an introduction to and survey of current research in the very active area of nonlinear wave equations. The key ingredients throughout the survey are the use of the null structure of the equations we consider and, intimately tied to it, bilinear estimates.

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We prove almost optimal local well-posedness for the coupled Dirac-Klein-Gordon (DKG) system of equations in 1 + 3 dimensions. The proof relies on the null structure of the system, combined with bilinear spacetime estimates of Klainerman-Machedon type. It has been known for some time that the Klein-Gordon part of the system has a null structure; here we uncover an additional null structure in the Dirac equation, which cannot be seen directly, but appears after a duality argument.

Abstract. We extend recent results of S. Machihara and H. Pecher on low regularity well-posedness of the Dirac-Klein-Gordon (DKG) system in one dimension. Our proof, like that of Pecher, relies on the null structure of DKG, recently completed by D'Ancona, Foschi and Selberg, but we show that in 1d the argument can be simplified by modifying the choice of projections for the Dirac operator. We also show that the result is best possible up to endpoint cases, if one iterates in Bourgain-Klainerman-Machedon spaces.

We uncover the full null structure of the Maxwell-Dirac system in Lorenz gauge. This structure, which cannot be seen in the individual component equations, but only when considering the system as a whole, is expressed in terms of tri-and quadrilinear integral forms with cancellations measured by the angles between spatial frequencies. In the 3D case, we prove frequencylocalized L 2 space-time estimates for these integral forms at the scale invariant regularity up to a logarithmic loss, hence we obtain almost optimal local wellposedness of the system by iteration.