Global instability and essential spectrum in semilinear evolution equations (Q1059783)

We consider semilinear evolution equations in Banach spaces. It is shown that when the linear part has some point of the essential spectrum or infinitely many eigenvalues with positive real part, and the nonlinear part satisfies some compactness requirements, then for generic initial values the corresponding positive trajectories are unbounded. This result is applied to some reaction-diffusion equations in unbounded domains and to the backwards initial value problem for semilinear damped wave equations.