On the Łojasiewicz--Simon gradient inequality. (Q1403856)

The author establishes in this paper a version of the Łojasiewicz-Simon inequality for functions which are not necessarily analytic. The abstract result is then applied to energy functionals of the form \(E(v)=\frac {1}{2}a(v,v)+\int_\Omega F(x,v)\,dx\), defined on a Hilbert space which is compactly embedded into \(L^2(\Omega)\). In the last part of the paper these results are applied to nonlinear evolution equations of the form \(u_t-\Delta u+| u| ^{p-1}u+\lambda u=0\) in \({\mathbb R}\times\Omega\). It is shown that in this example the underlying energy functional satisfies the Łojasiewicz-Simon inequality near the origin with Łojasiewicz exponent \(\theta =(p+1)^{-1}\). The proofs are based on refined estimates and a careful analysis of several classes of differential operators.