Considered in this paper is the modified Camassa–Holm equation with cubic nonlinearity, which is integrable and admits the single peaked solitons and multi-peakon solutions. The short-wave limit of this equation is known as the short-pulse equation. The main investigation is the Cauchy problem of the modified Camassa–Holm equation with qualitative properties of its solutions. It is firstly shown that the equation is locally well-posed in a range of the Besov spaces. The blow-up scenario and the lower bound of the maximal time of existence are then determined. A blow-up mechanism for solutions with certain initial profiles is described in detail and nonexistence of the smooth traveling wave solutions is also demonstrated.
