Characteristically Closed Domains for First Order Strictly Hyperbolic Systems in the Plane

Abstract

We consider a first order strictly hyperbolic system of n equations with constant coefficients in a bounded domain. It is assumed that the domain is strictly convex relative to characteristics, so that the projection along each characteristic is an involution having two fixed singular points. The natural statement of boundary value problems for such systems requires that singular points go to singular points under such transformations. We present a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of such domains, called characteristically closed.