The dimension of attractors of nonautonomous partial differential equations

Abstract

The concept of nonautonomous (or cocycle) attractor has become a proper tool for the study of the asymptotic behaviour of general nonautonomous partial differential equations. This is a time-dependent family of compact sets, invariant for the associated process and attracting “from ¡1”: In general, the concept is rather different from the classical one of global attractor for autonomous dynamical systems. We prove a general result on the finite fractal dimensionality of each compact set of this family. In this way, we generalize previous results of Chepyzhov and Vishik in [6]. Our results are also applied to differential equations with a nonlinear term having polynomial growth at most.