Stability of synchronous slowly oscillating periodic solutions for systems of delay differential equations with coupled nonlinearity (Q2172788)

This is an interesting paper which deals with the study of the stability of the so-called synchronous slowly oscillating periodic solutions of a system of delay differential equations of the form \[ \dot{x}^j(t)=-\alpha x^j(t)+\beta\sum_{k=1}^nG^{jk}f(x^k(t-1)), \quad j=\overline{1,n},\tag{E} \] where \(n\geq 2\), \( \alpha\geq 0\), \(\beta>0\), \(G=(G^{jk})\) is an \(n\times n\) square matrix whose each row sums to 1. For the function \(f\in C^1(\mathbb{R}, \mathbb{R})\) it is assumed that it satisfies the condition \(\xi f(\xi)<0\), for all \(\xi\neq 0\), \(\lim_{\infty}f=-a\), \(\lim_{-\infty}f=b\), \(f'(0)<0\), \(f'\in L_1(\mathbb{R})\) and \(\lim_{|\xi|\to+\infty}f'(\xi)=0\). A synchronous slowly oscillating periodic solution (SOPS) \(\mathbf{p}\) of the coupling equation (E) is a periodic solution of \((E)\) of the form \({\mathbf{p}}=(p, p, \dots, p)^T\), where \(p\) is a (nontrivial) solution of the associated scalar delay differential equation \[ \dot{x}(t)=-\alpha x(t)+\beta f(x(t-1)), \quad t\geq 0, \tag{DDE} \] such that for some \(z_0\geq -1\), \(z_1\geq z_0+1\), and \(z_2>z_1+1\), it holds \(p(t)>0\), \(z_0<t<z-1\), \(p(t)<0\), \(z_1<t<z_2\) and \(p\) is periodic with period \(\omega=z_2-z_1\). The main results of the paper are stated in the first six theorems. Section 1 of the paper contains some introduction to the problem and the statements of the main results, beginning with the fact that the existence of a unique SOPS for (DDE) guarantees the existence of a unique SOPS for (E) (Corollary 1). Theorem 2 gives information about the asymptotic stability of (E) in terms of the spectral radius of the matrix \(G\). In case of weakly coupled systems, namely when the matrix \(G\) is of the form \(I_n+\eta H\), a stability result is given in Theorem 3. in terms of the spectrum of the matrix \(H\). Analogous stability results are presented in Theorem 4, when the matrix \(G\) is of the form \(J_n+\eta H\), with \(J_n\) being the specific matrix \(J_n^{jk}:=(\frac{1}{n})\), for all indices \(j, k\). A stability result is given in Theorem 5 in terms of the quantity \(\Delta:=(\frac{a-b}{a+b})^2(\frac{1}{2}e^{-\alpha})^2-(1-\frac{a}{a+b}e^{-\alpha})(1-\frac{b}{a+b}e^{-\alpha})\). After some useful notation given in subsection 1.5 the authors present the basic background for the proof of the main results. Then in Section 3 the proof of Theorem 6 is given, while in Section 4 the convergence of normalised SOPS is investigated. In Sections 5, 6 and 7 it is studied the behaviour of the extended characteristic multipliers in terms of the parameters and especially when \(\beta\) becomes large enough. The proofs of the main results are given in Section 8, while in the last Section 9, some examples are presented. The paper closes with some numerical simulations of equation (E), just to see how large the parameter \(\beta\) must be to have stability.