Existence and multiplicity of homoclinic solutions for a class of damped vibration problems (Q548616)

The following damped vibration problems are considered: \[ -\ddot{u}(t)-B\dot{u}(t)+A(t)u(t)=\nabla F(t,u(t))\text{ a.e. }t\in\mathbb{R}, \] \[ u(t)\rightarrow 0\text{ and }\dot{u}(t)\rightarrow 0\text{ as }|t|\rightarrow\infty, \] where \(A\in C(\mathbb{R},\mathbb{R}^{N^2})\) is an \(N\times N\) symmetric matrix-valued function, \(B\) is an antisymmetric \(N\times N\) constant matrix and \(F \in C^1(\mathbb{R}\times \mathbb{R}^N,\mathbb{R})\). By means of two critical point theorems due to \textit{P.~H. Rabinowitz} [Reg. Conf. Ser. Math. 65 (vii) (1986; Zbl 0609.58002)], the authors establish existence and multiplicity results for homoclinic solutions to the considered problems. The result is obtained under the local Ambrosetti-Rabinowitz type condition, without any periodicity assumption on \(F\).