Delay equations and characteristic roots: stability and more from a single curve

Delays appear always more frequently in applications, ranging, e.g., from population dynamics to automatic control, where the study of steady states is undoubtedly of major concern. As many other dynamical systems, those generated by nonlinear delay equations usually obey the celebrated principle of linearized stability. Therefore, hyperbolic equilibria inherit the stability properties of the corresponding linearizations, the study of which relies on associated characteristic equations. The transcendence of the latter, due to the presence of the delay, leads to infinitely-many roots in the complex plane. Simple algebraic manipulations show, first, that all such roots belong to the intersection of two curves. Second, only one of these curves is crucial for stability, and relevant sufficient and/or necessary criteria can be easily derived from its analysis. Other aspects can be investigated under this framework and a link to the theory of modulus semigroups and monotone semiflows is also discussed