Weakly almost periodic semigroups of operators (Q1109318)

We address the question as to when a motion or almost-orbit u of a strongly continuous semigroup \((S(t))_{t\geq 0}\) of operators in a Banach space X will be weakly almost periodic in the sense of Eberlein. In particular, we show (a) that this is the case in practice exactly when u uniquely decomposes as the sum \(u=S(\cdot)y+\phi\) of an almost periodic motion S(\(\cdot)y:{\mathbb{R}}\) \(+\to X\) of \((S(t))_{t\geq 0}\) and a function \(\phi\) :\({\mathbb{R}}\) \(+\to X\) that vanishes at infinity in a certain weak sense, and (b) that an almost-orbit u of a uniformly bounded \(C_ 0\)-semigroup of linear operators will be weakly almost periodic provided only that u has weakly relatively compact range. Our results on existence and representation are then applied to a qualitative study of asymptotic behavior of solutions to the abstract Cauchy problem in which the focus is on almost periodicity properties and ergodic theorems.