Cosine families and semigroups really differ

Abstract

We reveal three surprising properties of cosine families, distinguishing them from semigroups of operators: (1) A single trajectory of a cosine family is either strongly continuous or not measurable. (2) Pointwise convergence of a sequence of equibounded cosine families implies that the convergence is almost uniform for time in the entire real line; in particular, cosine families cannot be perturbed in a singular way. (3) A non-constant trajectory of a bounded cosine family does not have a limit at infinity; in particular, the rich theory of asymptotic behaviour of semigroups does not have a counterpart for cosine families. In addition, we show that equibounded cosine families that converge strongly and almost uniformly in time may fail to converge uniformly.