  We consider a model that describes electromigration in nanoconductors known
as surface electromigration (SEM) equation. Our purpose here is to establish
local well-posedness for the associated initial value problem in Sobolev spaces
from two different points of view. In the first one, we study the pure Cauchy
problem and establish local well-posedness in $H^s(\mathbb{R}^2)$, $s>1/2$. In
the second one, we study the Cauchy problem on the background of a Korteweg-de
Vries solitary traveling wave in a less regular space. To obtain our results we
make use of the smoothing properties of solutions for the linear problem
corresponding to the Zakharov-Kuznetsov equation for the latter problem. For
the former problem we use bilinear estimates in Fourier restriction spaces
established by Molinet and Pilod.
