We present a new perspective concerning the study of the asymptotic behavior of variational equations by employing function spaces techniques. We give a complete description of the dichotomous behaviors of the most general case of skew-product flows, without any assumption concerning the flow, the cocycle or the splitting of the state space, our study being based only on the solvability of some associated control systems between certain function spaces. The main results do not only point out new necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of uniform and exponential dichotomy of skew-product flows, but also provide a clear chart of the connections between the classes of translation invariant function spaces that play the role of the input or output classes with respect to certain control systems. Finally, we emphasize the significance of each underlying hypothesis by illustrative examples and present several interesting applications.
A splitting theorem for affine skew-product flows
