Genericity of the Morse-Smale property for damped wave equations (Q1425233)

The authors prove that for damped hyperbolic equations the Morse-Smale property (the hyperbolicity of equilibria and transversal intersections of stable and unstable manifolds) is generic. Specifically, in an appropriate functional space of (local) nonlinearities, the set of functions for which the equation has the Morse-Smale property is residual. The result extends a similar theorem proved by \textit{P. Brunovký} and \textit{P. Poláčik} [J. Differ. Equations 135, No. 1, 129--181 (1997; Zbl 0868.35062)] for reaction-diffusion equations. Although some ideas from the latter work were useful, the proof for the wave equation is substantially different because of the lack of several crucial parabolic ingredients (notably the unique continuation properties). The authors found clever new ideas to deal with the extra difficulties.