Sharp Wasserstein stability and small-delay thresholds for evolution equations with measure-valued principal-part delays

Abstract

We study the dependence of solutions to coercive evolution equations on the law of a measure-valued delay acting through the principal spatial operator. For non-negative delay measures of equal mass, transport couplings and the time-translation modulus of one reference trajectory yield quantitative kernel-stability estimates. Fractional temporal regularity gives a Wasserstein rate, with explicit glueing and data criteria for its application. For moving point delays in a diffusion model, a solution-level lower bound matches both the rate and its dependence on the kernel mass. This matching estimate holds for zero prescribed history and uniformly bounded forcing in the natural dual energy space. The results also quantify concentration to positive delays and approximation by atomic quadrature. Separately, we determine a sharp class-level threshold for energy bounds uniform in the delay location. At the critical threshold, any fixed scalar mode is spectrally stable, but uniform space--time energy control fails in a small-delay, high-frequency limit. Above the threshold, the growth has an explicit asymptotic logarithmic rate.