Stability, resonance and Lyapunov inequalities for periodic conservative systems (Q629307)

This paper deals with the stable boundedness of the system \[ u''+P(t)u=0,\quad t\in{\mathbb R},\tag{1} \] where \(P(t)\) is a continuous, \(T\)-periodic, symmetric matrix such that (1) has only the trivial constant solution and the quadratic form \(k\mapsto\int_0^T(P(t)\cdot,\cdot)\,dt\) is positive semidefinite. (Stable boundedness means all the solutions of a system where \(P\) is replaced by a sufficiently close matrix, in \(L^1(0,T)\)-sense, are bounded.) The authors prove that stable boundedness occurs if for some \(T\)-periodic, diagonal matrix \(B(t)\) with entries \(b_{ii}(t)\), and numbers \(p_i\in[1,\infty]\), \(1\leq i\leq n\), (i) \(P(t)\leq B(t)\) \(\forall t\in{\mathbb R}\); (ii) \(\|b_{ii}^+\|_{p_i}<\beta^{\text{ant}}_{p_i}\) if \(p_1>1\) and \(\|b_{ii}^+\|_{p_i}\leq\beta^{\text{ant}}_{p_i}\) in case \(p_i=1\). Here, \(\beta^{\text{ant}}_p\) is the \(L^p\)-Lyapunov constant of the anti-periodic problem, that is, the infimum of \(L^p\) norms of functions \(a(t)^+\) such that \(u''+a(t)u=0\), \(u(0)+u(T)=0\), \(u'(0)+u'(T)=0\) has nontrivial solutions. The \(L^p\)-Lyapunov constants of the periodic problem are also shown to play a role in proving that certain systems with a variational structure have a unique \(T\)-periodic solution. These results use a theorem by Krein, later addressed by \textit{S. Clark} and \textit{D. Hinton} [Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 130, No.~10, 3005--3015 (2002; Zbl 1006.34078)].