Acyclicity of the solution set of two-point boundary value problems for second order multivalued differential equations (Q1686778)

The authors study topological and geometrical properties of the solution set of two-point boundary value problems for second order differential inclusions in a Banach space \(E\). The authors first consider \[ \begin{aligned} x^{\prime\prime}+a_{1}(t)x^{\prime}+a_{0}(t)x & \in F(t,x)\text{ on } I\equiv[0,1],\\ x(0) & =x(1),\\ x^{\prime}(0) & =x^{\prime}(1) \end{aligned} \] and it is shown that when \(E\) is reflexive and the multivalued function \(F\) is closed- and convex-valued, weak upper Carathéodory and accretive, then the solution set is a nonempty, compact, acyclic subset of \(C^{1}(I,E)\) and also of the space \(\mathbb{H}^{2}(I,E)\) equipped with the weak topology. To accomplish this, a Green's function is used to convert the problem to an integral equation to which the Browder-Gupta fixed point theorem is applied. Next it is shown that the solution set of the following problem \[ a_{2}(t)x^{\prime\prime}+a_{1}(t)x^{\prime}+a_{0}(t)x\in F(t,x)\text{ on }I\equiv[0,1], \] \[ b_{11}x(0)+b_{12}x^{\prime}(0)+c_{11}x(1)+c_{12}x^{\prime}(1)=d_{1}, \] \[ b_{21}x(0)+b_{22}x^{\prime}(0)+c_{21}x(1)+c_{22}x^{\prime}(1)=d_{2} \] is an absolute retract of the Bochner-Sobolev space \(W^{2,1}(I,E)\) when \(E\) is separable and \(F\) is closed- and bounded-valued, measurable and Lipschitz. Several related results and corollaries are also proven, and examples are given.