Global Smoothing for the Periodic KdV Evolution

The Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation with periodic boundary conditions is considered. It is shown that for $H^s$ initial data, $s>-1/2$, and for any $s_1<\min(3s+1,s+1)$, the difference of the nonlinear and linear evolutions is in $H^{s_1}$ for all times, with at most polynomially growing $H^{s_1}$ norm. The result also extends to KdV with a smooth, mean zero, time-dependent potential in the case $s\geq 0$. Our result and a theorem of Oskolkov for the Airy evolution imply that if one starts with continuous and bounded variation initial data then the solution of KdV (given by the $L^2$ theory of Bourgain) is a continuous function of space and time. In addition, we demonstrate smoothing for the modified KdV equation on the torus for $s>1/2$.