Precise damping conditions for global asymptotic stability for nonlinear second order systems (Q1309362)

Consider a linear or nonlinear oscillator being under the action of friction. It is an old problem to find conditions in terms of the damping function guaranteeing global asymptotic stability for the rest point of the system. The problem is delicate because e.g., in the simplest case of the linear viscous friction the damping coefficient must not be ``too small'' or ``too large'' in mean. The authors deal with this problem for very general nonlinear quasi-variational systems of many degrees of freedom. The precise conditions they gave generalize and sharpen the earlier results even in the well-studied special cases (e.g. in the scalar linear case!). Unfortunately, there is no room in such a review to cite the conditions, so we emphasize only one of their novelty: the upper and the lower time-functions that bound the damping function from above and from below, respectively, may interact in the conditions. In the paper, the non-homogeneous case (i.e. the case of the forced oscillator) is also treated.