Attractors of non-autonomous parabolic equations and their symmetry properties (Q1969977)

The authors consider the Dirichlet problem for a general second-order uniformly parabolic equation \[ u_t=F(t,x,u,\partial_1 u,\dots,\partial_N u, \partial_{11} u,\dots,\partial_{NN} u), \quad x\in D. \] Here \(D\subset \mathbb{R}^N\) is a bounded domain that is symmetric under the reflection in a hyperplane and convex in the normal direction to that hyperplane. The nonlinearity has the symmetries associated with the reflection. They show that any bounded positive solution is asymptotically symmetric (that is, even about the hyperplane), in the sense that all its limit profiles, as \(t\to\infty\), are symmetric. Under an extra condition on the nonlinearity, the asymptotic symmetrization is exponential. These results extend and improve an earlier result of \textit{P. Hess} and \textit{P. Poláčik} [Proc. R. Soc. Edinb., Sect. A 124, 573-587 (1994; Zbl 0811.35049)]. The authors further study the linearization around a positive bounded solution \(u(x,t)\) defined for all \(t\leq 0\) (a backward solution). Under extra assumptions, they show that all bounded solutions of the linearization have the reflectional symmetry as well. Such results in particular imply the symmetry of the unstable manifold of \(u\). Finally, the authors present several results on attractors of (nonautonomous) equations of the above form and obtain their symmetry properties. They thus extend earlier results of \textit{A. V. Babin} [J. Dyn. Differ. Equations 6, 639-658 (1994; Zbl 0807.35065) and J. Differ. Equations 123, 122-152 (1995; Zbl 0852.35069)] that dealt with autonomous equations.