Hausdorff and fractal dimensions of attractors for functional differential equations in Banach spaces

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to obtain estimations of Hausdorff dimension as well as fractal dimension of global attractors and pullback attractors for both autonomous and nonautonomous functional differential equations (FDEs) in Banach spaces. New criterions for the finite Hausdorff dimension and fractal dimension of attractors in Banach spaces are firslty proposed by combining the squeezing property and the covering of finite subspace of Banach spaces, which generalize the method established in Hilbert spaces. In order to surmount the barrier caused by the lack of orthogonal projectors with finite rank, which is the key tool for proving the squeezing property of partial differential equations in Hilbert spaces, we adopt the state decomposition of phase space based on the exponential dichotomy of the studied FDEs to obtain similar squeezing property. The theoretical results are applied to a retarded nonlinear reaction-diffusion equation and a non-autonomous retarded functional differential equation in the natural phase space, for which explicit bounds of dimensions that do not depend on the entropy number but only depend on the spectrum of the linear parts and Lipschitz constants of the nonlinear parts are obtained.