Dimension prints and the avoidance of sets for flow solutions of non-autonomous ordinary differential equations (Q390986)

In this well-written and very nice paper, the authors consider the problem of avoidance of sets in the context of irregular, non-autonomous ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Specifically, the authors consider ODEs \(\dot{x}=f(x,t)\) where \(f\in L^{p}\left(0,T;L^{q}\left(\mathbb{R}^{n}\right)\right)\) for some \(1\leq p,q\leq\infty\). Such equations arise in fluid mechanics, where, for instance, \(f\) is a solution of the Navier-Stokes equations. In this context, it is of interest to have criteria guaranteeing the existence of a unique generalised flow in the sense of \textit{R. J. DiPerna} and \textit{P. L. Lions} [Invent. Math. 98, No. 3, 511--547 (1989; Zbl 0696.34049)]. One possible approach is to re-formulate the uniqueness problem as an avoidance problem, i.e., establish that a generalised flow avoids some critical set in (extended) state space. In the autonomous setting, \textit{M. Aizenman} proved in [Duke Math. J. 45, 809--813 (1978; Zbl 0471.28015)] avoidance of a subset \(S\subset\mathbb{R}^{n}\) provided that the vector field \(f\) is sufficiently regular and \(S\) has sufficiently small box-counting dimension. To extend Aizenman's autonomous result to the non-autonomous setting, the authors introduce the notion of \(r\)-codimension print for a subset of extended state space \(S\subset\mathbb{R}^{n}\times[0,T]\), which encodes the dimension of \(S\) in a way that distinguishes spatial and temporal detail. The geometry of the \(r\)-codimension print, together with two examples, is worked out in detail. The main result concerning the avoidance problem is that a compact subset \(S\) of the extended state space is avoided by a generalised flow with vector field \(f\) as above if the Hölder conjugates \(\left(q^{*},p^{*}\right)\) are contained in the \(r\)-codimension print of \(S\).