Necessary and sufficient conditions for oscillations of neutral differential equations (Q1094576)

The purpose of this paper is to prove the following: Theorem. Consider the neutral delay differential equation (1) \(x'(t)+px'(t-\tau)+qx(t- \sigma)=0,\) \(t\geq t_ 0\) where \(\tau\),q,\(\sigma\) are positive constants and p is a real parameter. Then a necessary and sufficient condition for all solutions of (1) to oscillate is that the characteristic equation \(\lambda +p\lambda e^{-\lambda t}+qe^{-\lambda \sigma}=0\) of (1) has no real roots. Here a solution is called oscillatory if it has arbitrarily large zeros and nonoscillatory if it is eventually positive or eventually negative. In the proof of the above theorem the necessity part is easy. The authors prove the sufficiency part by discussing the following five cases: (i) \(p=0\), (ii) \(-1<p<0\), (iii) \(p=-1\), (iv) \(p<- 1\), (v) \(p>0\).