Structure of attractors for skew product semiflows (Q2449612)

This paper illuminates the interesting question of continuity and structural stability for (uniform) attractors subject to time-dependent perturbations. Beginning within the classical framework of semiflows generated by autonomous evolution equations, the required concepts of global attractors, isolated invariant sets, homoclinic structures, generalized dynamically gradient semigroups relative to a (disjoint) family of isolated invariant sets, and finally Morse-Smale semigroups are introduced. Using these preliminaries the authors formulate a result on the continuity of attractors, as well as their topological and geometrical structural stability. In order to describe nonautonomous dynamics the authors follow two approaches: First, they work with an (evolutionary) process formulation, to which the above notions and continuity results are generalized -- for instance, the pullback attractor is the nonautonomous counterpart to the classical global attractor. Second, a skew-product formulation is investigated yielding in particular the notion of a uniform attractor. Then relations between these different attractor concepts are carefully investigated. After introducing the notion of lifted-invariance, the uniform attractor is characterized as maximal bounded isolated lifted-invariant subset of the state space. These preparations allow an insight into the attractor's internal dynamics. For dynamically gradient nonautonomous dynamical systems (NDSs for short), a Morse decomposition by means of isolated lifted-invariant sets is constructed. Under appropriate \(C^0\)-continuity assumptions the authors obtain a topological structural stability result yielding that the considered NDS is dynamically gradient. Moreover, sufficient conditions for a continuously differentiable NDSs to be Morse-Smale are obtained. Finally, explicit applications to time-varying perturbations of evolution equations and even more concrete, to a hyperbolic periodic orbit are given.