Attractivity and bifurcation for nonautonomous dynamical systems (Q885342)

The book aims at a systematic treatment of stability and bifurcation theory for nonautonomous dynamical systems going beyond the usual examples, nonautonomous difference and differential equations, and random dynamical systems. To this end attractive and repulsive sets for general nonautonomous systems on four different time scales are considered: past, future, all-time and finite-time attractors and repellers. Bifurcations are understood as changes in the stability properties of these sets. Motivated by the autonomous pitchfork and Hopf bifurcation, two scenarios are considered: The domain of attraction may shrink to zero when a parameter is varied (this is called ``nonautonomous bifurcation'') or an attractor/repeller may change from a trivial object to a nontrivial one (this is called ``attractor/repeller transition''). It turns out that those definitions are suitable to introduce attractor-repellor pairs and Morse decompositions for nonautonomous dynamical systems. After studying linearized stability and instability of trivial solutions, the relation between finite-time bifurcations and adiabatic systems and their delayed loss of stability is examined and extensions of the classical transcritical and pitchfork bifurcation theorems in one space dimension are proved. The last chapter deals with asymptotically autonomous systems and their bifurcations, in particular an analogue of the Hopf bifurcation. The book shows that with suitably defined notions of stability and bifurcation it is possible to develop some aspects of bifurcation theory for nonautonomous dynamical systems which are very similar to their classical autonomous counterparts.