Exponential Stability of Traveling Pulse Solutions of a Singularly Perturbed System of Integral Differential Equations Arising From Excitatory Neuronal Networks

<正> We establish the exponential stability of fast traveling pulse solutions to nonlinear singularly per-turbed systems of integral differential equations arising from neuronal networks.It has been proved that expo-nential stability of these orbits is equivalent to linear stability.Let (?) be the linear differential operator obtainedby linearizing the nonlinear system about its fast pulse,and let σ((?)) be the spectrum of (?).The linearizedstability criterion says that if max{Reλ:λ∈σ((?)),λ≠0}(?)-D,for some positive constant D,and λ=0 is asimple eigenvalue of (?)(ε),then the stability follows immediately (see [13] and [37]).Therefore,to establish theexponential stability of the fast pulse,it suffices to investigate the spectrum of the operator (?).It is relativelyeasy to find the continuous spectrum,but it is very difficult to find the isolated spectrum.The real part ofthe continuous spectrum has a uniformly negative upper bound,hence it causes no threat to the stability.Itremains to see if the isolated spectrum is safe.Eigenvalue functions (see [14] and [35,36]) have been a powerful tool to study the isolated spectrum of the as-sociated linear differential operators because the zeros of the eigenvalue functions coincide with the eigenvaluesof the operators.There have been some known methods to define eigenvalue functions for nonlinear systems ofreaction diffusion equations and for nonlinear dispersive wave equations.But for integral differential equations,we have to use different ideas to construct eigenvalue functions.We will use the method of variation of param-eters to construct the eigenvalue functions in the complex plane C.By analyzing the eigenvalue functions,wefind that there are no nonzero eigenvalues of (?) in {λ∈C:Reλ(?)-D} for the fast traveling pulse.Moreoverλ=0 is simple.This implies that the exponential stability of the fast orbits is true.