Skew product semiflows and Morse decomposition

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the investigation of the dynamics of non-autonomous differential equations. The description of the asymptotic dynamics of non-autonomous equations lies on dynamical structures of some associated limiting non-autonomous – and autonomous – differential equations (one for each global solution in the attractor of the driving semigroup of the associated skew product semiflow). In some cases, we have infinitely many limiting problems (in contrast with the autonomous – or asymptotically autonomous – case for which we have only one limiting problem; that is, the semigroup itself). We concentrate our attention in the study of the Morse decomposition of attractors for these non-autonomous limiting problems as a mean to understand some of the asymptotics of our non-autonomous differential equations. In particular, we derive a Morse decomposition for the global attractors of skew product semiflows (and thus for pullback attractors of non-autonomous differential equations) from a Morse decomposition of the attractor for the associated driving semigroup. Our theory is well suited to describe the asymptotic dynamics of non-autonomous differential equations defined on the whole line or just for positive times, or for differential equations driven by a general semigroup.