In this paper we extend a theorem of Mallet-Paret and Sell for the existence of an inertial manifold for a scalar-valued reaction diffusion equation to new physical domains ωn ⊂ Rn, n = 2,3. For their result the Principle of Spatial Averaging (PSA), which certain domains may possess, plays a key role for the existence of an inertial manifold. Instead of the PSA, we define a weaker PSA and prove that the domains φn with appropriate boundary conditions for the Laplace operator, δ, satisfy a weaker PSA. This weaker PSA is enough to ensure the existence of an inertial manifold for a specific class of scalar-valued reaction diffusion equations on each domain ωn under suitable conditions.

The problem of finding necessary and sufficient condi-tions for the existence of trapped modes in waveguides has been known since 1943. [10]. The problem is the following: consider an infinite strip M in ℝ2(or an infinite cylinder with the smooth boundary in ℝn). The spectrum of the(positive) Laplacian, with either Dirichlet or Neumann boundary conditions, acting on this strip is easily computable via the separation of variables; the spectrum is absolutely continuous and equals [v0,+∞). Here, v0 is the first threshold, i.e., eigenvalue of the cross-section of the cylinder (so v0 = 0 in the case of Neumann conditions). Let us now consider the domain (the waveguide) which is a smooth compact perturbation of M (for example, weinsert an obstacle inside M). The essential spectrum of the Laplacian acting on still equals [v0, +ℝ), but there may be additional eigenvalues, which are often called trapped modes; the number of these trapped modes can be quite large, see examples in [11] and [8].

In this paper, we apply coupling methods to study strong ergodicity for Markov processes, and sufficient conditions are presented in terms of the expectations of coupling times. In particular, explicit criteria are obtained for one-dimensional diffusions and birth-death processes to be strongly ergodic. As a by-product, strong ergodicity implies that the essential spectra of the generators for these processes are empty.

We give sufficient conditions for the spectra and essential spectra of certain classes of operators to be contained in or coincide with an interval of the form [μ, ∞).