Exponential stability of the reduced Bresse--Gurtin--Pipkin system with one temperature

Abstract

We consider the reduced Bresse--Gurtin--Pipkin system with one temperature, obtained from the full Bresse--Gurtin--Pipkin thermoelastic beam system by neglecting one of the two temperature variables. This system was left essentially open in a recent work of Dell'Oro, where only a conjecture on its exponential stability condition was formulated. By combining the spectral analysis recently developed by Dell'Oro, Pata and Vasylyeva for the abstract Gurtin--Pipkin heat equation with the resolvent estimate framework of Dell'Oro for Bresse systems, we prove that the associated contraction semigroup is exponentially stable if and only if two explicit stability numbers, depending on the structural constants of the beam, both vanish. The proof is based on a spectral characterization of the infinitesimal generator in a half-plane containing the imaginary axis, an analysis of its spectrum on the imaginary axis, sharp upper bounds for the resolvent, and the Gearhart--Prüss theorem. In particular, we confirm the conjecture of Dell'Oro and provide a rigorous spectral analysis of the reduced system. The same method yields the exponential stability characterization of the corresponding reduced Bresse--Maxwell--Cattaneo system, and can be adapted to other reduced Bresse-type models.