Smoothness of Invariant Manifolds for Nonautonomous Equations

Abstract

For semiflows generated by ordinary differential equations v’=A(t)v admitting a nonuniform exponential dichotomy, we show that for any sufficiently small perturbation f there exist smooth stable and unstable manifolds for the perturbed equation v’=A(t)v+f(t,v). As an application, we establish the existence of invariant manifolds for the nonuniformly hyperbolic trajectories of a semiflow. In particular, we obtain smooth invariant manifolds for a class of vector fields that need not be C1+ α for any α ∈ (0,1). To the best of our knowledge no similar statement was obtained before in the nonuniformly hyperbolic setting. We emphasize that we do not need to assume the existence of an exponential dichotomy, but only the existence of a nonuniform exponential dichotomy, with sufficiently small nonuniformity when compared to the Lyapunov exponents of the original linear equation. Furthermore, for example in the case of stable manifolds, we only need to assume that there exist negative Lyapunov exponents, while we also allow zero exponents. Our proof of the smoothness of the invariant manifolds is based on the construction of an invariant family of cones.