Abstract

We study the boundedness of all solutions for the following differential equation where are odd functions, is an even function, are smooth -periodic functions, is a nonzero constant, and is a small parameter. A sufficient and necessary condition for the boundedness of all solutions of the above equation is established. Moreover, the existence of Aubry-Mather sets is obtained as well.

1. Introduction

It is well known that the longtime behavior for periodically forced planar systems can be very intricate. For example, there are equations having unbounded solutions but with infinitely many zeros and with nearby unbounded solutions having randomly prescribed number of zeros and also periodic solutions; see [1]. In contrast to such unbounded phenomenon Littlewood [2] suggested to study the boundedness of all the solutions of the following differential equation: in the following two cases:(i)superlinear case: as ;(ii)sublinear case: and as . Later, one calls this subject as Littlewood boundedness problem.

The first result in superlinear case is obtained by Morris [3], who showed that all solutions of are bounded, where . Later, a series results in superlinear case were obtained by several authors, see [413] and references therein. However, in general, it is harder to study the Lagrange stability of sublinear systems since smoothness of sublinear term is insufficient. There are only a few works in sublinear case so far. In 1999, Küpper and You [14] proved the first result in the study of the equation where and . Later, Liu [15] proved the same result for more general equation where satisfying the sublinear condition (ii) and some inequalities, and . In 2004, Ortega and Verzini [16] studied the boundedness of (4) in a special case with the variational method. In 2009, Wang [17] gave a sufficient and necessary condition for the boundedness of all solutions for sublinear equation where .

As is widely known, there is a deep similarity between reversible and Hamiltonian dynamics. Many fundamental results of the Hamiltonian systems possess reversible counterparts. On boundedness problem for sublinear reversible systems, the first results were obtained by Li [18], later, Yang [19], in the study of a sublinear reversible systems Recently, Wang [20] gave a sufficient and necessary condition for the boundedness of all solutions of the differential equation with , .

By the discussions about the sublinear Hamiltonian equation (1.3) in [17] motivations, we will study the boundedness of all solutions for a sublinear reversible system like where and . Furthermore, we also show that (8) has solutions of Mather type. The results obtained in [1820] can be regarded as corollary of result of this paper.

Remark 1. Using the method of this paper we also can consider the more general equation provided of adding suitable conditions for . For convenience, we only consider the case .

Remark 2. Adding the perturbation term will lead to a new difficulty for estimating appeared in (86). Fortunately, we can easily verify that is bounded by a constant (see in the proof of Lemma 12).

Throughout this paper, we denote two universal positive constants without regarding their values by and , and suppose that the following conditions hold:(A1), and , and are odd, is even, and , are both -periodic functions, ;(A2) there is some positive constant such that the inequalities are satisfied for and all , where .

We decompose as , where is the average of and has zero mean value. That is and . If we write that , then it is easy to see that and have the same sign when with .

Now we state the main results of this paper.

Theorem 3. Assume that and - hold. Then there exists an such that for any , every solution of (8) is bounded if and only if .

Theorem 4. Under the conditions of Theorem 3, there is an such that, for any , (8) has a solution of Mather type with rotation number . More precisely:(i)if is rational, the solutions , , are periodic solutions of period q; moreover, in this case (ii)if is irrational, the solution is either a usual quasi-periodic solution or a generalized one.
We recall that a solution is called generalized quasi-periodic if the closed set is a Denjoys minimal set.

2. Reversible Systems and Action-Angle Variables

In this section, we will assume that and . Firstly, we consider (8) which is equivalent to the following system: where . Then we can obtain that (13) is reversible with respect to the transformation by (A1).

Lemma 5. There exists a -invariant diffeomorphism such that (13) is transformed into the following system: where .

Proof. Introduce a transformation : where will be determined later. Under this transformation, the system (13) is transformed into a new system as follows: Now, we define the function by Since , so we can obtain . Then the new system can be expressed as in (14) by direct computation.
It is easy to know that by (A1), then we can obtain that the transformation is a -invariant diffeomorphism.

Let us consider the auxiliary system which is a time-independent Hamiltonian system with Hamiltonian

It is easy to see that , , . Note that each level line is a close orbit of system (18), hence, all the solutions of (18) are periodic with period tending to zero as tends to infinity.

Assume that is the solution of (18) with initial conditions , and let be the minimal period. We can find that and satisfy(i), ;(ii), ;(iii), ;(iv); (v); (vi), ;(vii).

Then we introduce the transformation which is where . It is easy to see that by . Since , this transformation is invariant with respect to the involutions and , and we can find that the mapping is a generalized canonical transformation by (iv). In fact, where .

Under the transformation , the system (18) is transformed into the simpler form where .

The original system (13) is transformed into the system where

Let Clearly, is odd in and is even in by the definitions of and . Thus, by the evenness of and the oddness of and we have This implies that system (24) is reversible with respect to the involutions .

Lemma 6. For , the following inequalities hold:(1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7),
where , , and .

Proof. (1) It is easy to know that is a sum of terms of the form where . Meanwhile, is a sum terms of the form Hence, we obtain by the assumptions on and the definitions of and .
(2) From the expression of , we have
We can find that where .
(3) From the expression of , we have
(4) From the expression of , we can obtain that
(5) From the definition of , we have
(6) From the definition of , we can obtain Hence, we can know that where .
(7) From the expression of , we have

For , we define the domain

Lemma 7. There exists a -invariant diffeomorphism : such that for some . Under this transformation, (24) is transformed into the system where with

Proof. Define a transformation by By we get Let , . The system (24) is transformed into (41).

Lemma 8. For large enough, the following conclusions hold:(i), (ii).

Proof. In view of we obtain By , we have for large enough. Hence, is uniquely determined by the contraction mapping principle. Moreover, , for some , as a consequence of the implicit function theorem and
Above all, if , from (47) and (49), we get
We note that and the right side hand is sum of the term where , , . The highest order term in is the one with , namely, . We move the part to the left hand side of (52). Since for large enough, this also provides immediately a bound on . The rest part .
Now, we proceed inductively by assuming that for the estimates hold and we wish to conclude that the same estimate holds for .
Indeed, if , we have by This proves (i) of Lemma 8.
Now we check (ii). In fact, since we have From (47), we have for sufficiently large and therefore we obtain .

By the estimates in Lemma 6, we can prove the following inequalities.

Lemma 9. For , the following inequalities hold:(1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7).

Proof. (1) From the estimates (1) and (5) of Lemmas 6 and 8, it follows that (2) Since we can prove that Their proofs are similar to the proofs in (1).
Next, we check the last part of   . We get by the estimate in Lemma 6 and the definition of .
(3) It is clearly by (3) in Lemma 6.
(4) It is clearly by (4) in Lemmas 6 and 8.
(5) We have that From the last inequalities and (5) in Lemma 6, we obtain (6) Since we just have to prove that In fact, so we have proved (6).
(7) We have by (7) in Lemma 6.

3. The Proof of Boundedness

In this section, all the solutions of (8) which are bounded will be proved via the KAM theory for reversible systems developed by Sevryuk [21] or Moser [22, 23] if .

We define the functions , , , , , , and as Then system (41) is equivalent to the following system:

In addition, one can verify that system (70) is reversible with respect to involution .

Then some estimates on the functions and are given.

Lemma 10. The following inequalities hold:(1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), for .

Proof. (1) It is clear.
(2) Note that , and it follows that as .
Moreover, we also have So From (72) and (74), it is easy to see that (3) We have By (72), and , we have for .
Let . We find that so
When , the proof of (3) is similar to the proof of (2).
When , then
(4) The proof of (4) is similar to the proof of (3).
(5) Let . By using the estimates on the functions and , it follows thatwhen .
When , then by .
(6) By using the estimates on the functions and , it follows that
(7) By using the estimates on the functions and , it follows that

Let , , and where is the inverse function of .

Then system (70) is transformed into the following form: Moreover, one can verify that system (86) is reversible with respect to involution .

It is easy to see that if and only if , and the solutions of system (86) do exist on when .

By using the estimates on and in Lemma 10, the following inequalities can be proved.

Lemma 11. For and , the following inequalities hold:(1), (2), (3), (4).

Proof. Above all, we know that , so we can get . Then we have
(1) We have that
(2) We have that
(3) We have that (4) We have that

Lemma 12. The time 1 map of the flow of the system (86) is of the form where . And there exists a such that, for , sufficiently large and sufficiently small , hold. Moreover, the map is reversible with respect to the involution .

Proof. Since then we get is bounded.
Let . Set with for the flow: Since where denotes the vector field of the system (86), we have which is equivalent to the following equations for and :
Let , . Define , and , where Next, we will prove that is a contraction map. From the definition of , we have by Lemma 11 and the boundedness of . Then we have by the definition of the norm .
Using the contraction principle, one verifies easily that for , (98) has a unique solution in the space . Moreover, and are smooth.
Next, we will estimate and as follows: In order to prove (93), we just need to prove that hold for .
(1) When , where .
(2) When and , we check the case when firstly Hence, Now, we proceed inductively by assuming that for the estimates hold and we wish to conclude that the same estimate holds for where . Hence,
(3) We can prove that similarly to (2) when .
(4) we have that Hence,
(5) We can prove (103) similarly to (4) for the left .

Proof of Boundedness. From Theorem 1.1 in [21] we can see possesses a sequence of invariant circles tending to infinity. So, in the original system (13), there exists a corresponding sequence of invariant tori in phase space . Then any solution of system (13) is bounded because it must stay within one of those tori.

4. The Proof of Unboundedness

In this section, we will prove that all solutions of (8) are unbounded if . In this case, .

Consider (8) which is equivalent to the following system: Replacing (18) by an “auxiliary” system

Under the transformation (21), the system (113) is transformed into the form where

Thus, the system (115) can be written in the form From the equality it follows that Hence, the function is , 1-periodic and change the sign. Since for any , there exists such that That is, . In view of we find Hence, we obtain that or is negative. This proves that there exists a such that and . Therefore, there are and such that for and for , for . Let Then, if is sufficiently large, on the set , we have

From (117) and (124) we obtain, for , Moreover, for and , we have From (126) and (127), it follows that any solution of (115) with the initial condition always stays in and satisfies with , for all . The proof of Theorem 3 is completed.

5. The Proof of Theorem 4

In this section, we will prove Theorem 4 by using the abstract result on the existence of quasi-periodic solutions proved in [24] in the context Aubry-Mather theory for reversible systems. We only need to show that the Poincaré map (92) has the monotone property; that is,

We can get that by Lemma 11, and by Lemma 12. Then we have where . Therefore, we have as and . This proves the validity of (128).

Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant nos. 11171185, 10871117) and SDNSF (Grant no. ZR2010AM013).