Input–output control systems and dichotomy of variational difference equations

We propose a new and unified approach for the study of dichotomy of variational difference equations, establishing a link between control methods and basic techniques from interpolation theory. We obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of uniform dichotomy and, respectively, for uniform exponential dichotomy of variational difference equations in terms of the admissibility of general pairs of sequence spaces. We provide a classification of the main classes of sequence spaces where the input spaces and the output spaces may belong to, for each dichotomy property and prove that the hypotheses on the underlying sequence spaces cannot be removed. The obtained results extend the framework to the study of dichotomy of variational difference equations, hold without any requirement on the coefficients and are applicable to all systems of variational difference equations.