Global asymptotic stability of nonautonomous master equations: a proof of the Earnshaw-Keener conjecture (Q6041816)

This paper studies the global asymptotical behavior of solutions for a special class of linear system of differential equations \[ x'=A(t)x,\tag{1}\] where \(A\in C(\mathbb R_{+},\mathcal M)\) and \(\mathcal M\) is a subset of the space \([\mathbb R^{n}]\) of all real \(n\times n\) matrices. Recall that \(C=(c_{ij})_{i,j=1}^{n}\in [\mathbb R^{n}]\) is said to be: \begin{itemize} \item[1.] a Metzler matrix if \(c_{ij}\ge 0\) for any \(i,j=1,\ldots,n\) with \(i\not= j\); \item[2.] \(W\)-matrix (or Kirchhoff matrix) if it is Metzler and \(\sum_{i=1}^{n}c_{ij}=0\) for any \(j=1,\ldots,n\). \end{itemize} Note that the set \(\Sigma_{1}:=\{x\in \mathbb R^{n}_{+}|\ x_1+\ldots+x_n=1\}\) is invariant with respect to system (1) if \(A\in C(\mathbb R_{+},\mathbb W)\), where \(\mathbb W\) is the subspace of all \(W\)-matrices from \([\mathbb R^{n}]\). This means that \(\varphi(t,x,A)\in \Sigma_{1}\) for any \((t,x)\in \mathbb R_{+}\times \Sigma_{1}\), where \(\varphi(t,x,A)\) is a unique solution of (1) passing through the point \(x\in \mathbb R^{n}\) at the initial moment \(t=0\). The main result of the paper is the following \textbf{Theorem.} Suppose that \(A\in C(\mathbb R_{+},\mathbb W)\) which is uniformly continuous and bounded on \(\mathbb R_{+}\). If \(\omega(A):=\{B|\) there exists a sequence \(t_k\to +\infty\) such that \(A(t_k)\to B\) as \(k\to \infty\}\) contains at least one matrix which is neither decomposable nor splitting, then the solutions from \(\Sigma_{1}\) of the system (1) are globally asymptotically stable, i.e., \[ \lim\limits_{t\to +\infty}|\varphi(t,u,A)-\varphi(t,v,A)|_{1}=0 \] for any \(u,v\in \Sigma_{1}\), where \(|x|_{1}:=|x_1|+\ldots+|x_n|\) (\(x\in \mathbb R^{n}\)).