Decay for the nonlinear KdV equations at critical lengths

Abstract: We consider the nonlinear Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation in a bounded interval equipped with the Dirichlet boundary condition and the Neumann boundary condition on the right. It is known that there is a set of critical lengths for which the solutions of the linearized system conserve the $L^2$-norm if their initial data belong to a finite dimensional subspace $\M$. In this paper, we show that all solutions of the nonlinear KdV system decay to 0 at least with the rate $1/ t^{1/2}$ when $\dim \M = 1$ or when $\dim \M$ is even and a specific condition is satisfied, provided that their initial data is sufficiently small. Our analysis is inspired by the power series expansion approach and involves the theory of quasi-periodic functions. As a consequence, we rediscover known results which were previously established for $\dim \M = 1$ or for the smallest critical length $L$ with $\dim \M = 2$ by a different approach using the center manifold theory, and obtain new results. We also show that the decay rate is not slower than $\ln (t + 2) / t$ for all critical lengths.