On a kind of symmetric weakly non-linear ordinary differential systems (Q5962425)

The authors study a system of \(n\) weakly non-linear ordinary differential equations of the form \[ x'(t) \, = \, \varepsilon \, f(x(t),t), \] where \(t \in J\), \(J \subset \mathbb{R}\) is an open interval, \(\varepsilon \in \mathbb{R}\) is a small parameter and \(f: \mathbb{R}^n \times J \to \mathbb{R}^n\) is a continuous function, \(f(\cdot, t)\) is \(\mathcal{C}^2\)-smooth for every \(t \in J\) and \(f\) is symmetric in the sense that there exists a regular \(n \times n\) matrix with real coefficients \(A\) and a function \(\psi \in \mathcal{C}^1(J,J)\) such that \[ A f(z,t) \, = \, \psi'(t) \, f(Az,\psi(t)) \] for all \((z,t) \in \mathbb{R}^n \times J\). The interest is on \textit{symmetric solutions} which are solutions \(x: J \to \mathbb{R}\) of class \(\mathcal{C}^1\) and such that \[ x\left(\psi(t) \right) \, = \, A \, x(t) \, \text{ for } \, t \in J. \] These definitions on the symmetry are a generalization and contain many usual concepts as time-reversible, \(T\)-periodicity, odd solutions. The authors establish the existence and uniqueness of a symmetric solution and its stability is studied. At the end of the paper, several examples of scalar equations illustrate the results.