Absence of small solutions and existence of Morse decomposition for a cyclic system of delay differential equations (Q2184719)

The author studies the unidirectional cyclic system of delay differential equations \[\dot{x}^i(t)=g^i(x^i(t),x^{i+1}(t-\tau^i),t)\] for \(0\le i\le N\), and the indices are taken modulo \(N+1\) for some \(N\in\mathbb{N}_0\), \(\tau^i\in[0,\infty)\) and \(g^i\) is continuous in \(t\in\mathbb{R}\) and \(C^1(\mathbb{R}^2)\) with respect to \((u,v)\), each of them satisfying either a positive or negative feedback condition in the delayed term. The work studies the existence of superexponential solutions, i.e. tending to zero for \(t\to\infty\) faster than every \(e^{-\beta t}\) for \(\beta>0\), under certain conditions. More precisely, the first result in the work (Theorem 2.2) states that every component \(w^i\) of a superexponential solution of the main problem must change signs infinitely often on every interval of length \(\sum_{i=0}^{N}\tau^i\). As a consequence, if a backwards-bounded global pull-back attractor exists, then it does not contain any superexponential solutions (Theorem 2.9). The last main result deals with the autonomous equation, and the statement that, under certain hypotheses on the sign of \(g\), the solutions exist globally in forward time and the existence of a connected global attractor, which admits a Morse decomposition (Theorem 3.2).