Forced Oscillations of a Damped Korteweg-de Vries Equation in a Quarter Plane (Q4454538)

The authors are inspired by some laboratory experiments which have shown that when nonlinear, dispersive waves are forced periodically from one hand by an undisturbed stretch of the medium of propagation, then the signal eventually becomes temporally periodic at each spatial point. In their paper the authors establish the preceding result in the context of a damped Korteweg de Vries equation. To this aim, the authors consider the initial boundary-value problem \[ u_t+u_x+uu_x+u_{xxx}+\alpha u=0,\tag{1} \] with \(x\geq 0\), \(t\geq 0\), \(u(0,t)=h(t)\), \(u(0,x)=\phi(x)\). For this problem, it is shown that if the small amplitude, boundary forcing \(h\) is periodic of period \(T\), then the solution \(u\) of (1) is eventually periodic of period \(T\). Precisely, the authors show that for each \(x<0\), \(u(x,t+T)-u(x,t)\) converges to zero exponentially as \(t\to\infty\). If (1) is regarded as an infinite dimensional dynamical system in Hilbert space \(H^s(\mathbb{R}^+)\) for suitable values of \(s\), the authors also demonstrate that for a given, small amplitude time-periodic boundary forcing, the system (1) admits a unique limit circle, or a forced oscillation. The authors show as well that this limit circle is globally exponentially stable. This means, equivalently, that it comprises an exponentially stable attractor for the infinite-dimensional system described by (1).