A necessary and sufficient condition on scattering for the regularly hyperbolic systems

The present paper is devoted to finding a necessary and sufficient condition on the occurence of scattering for the regularly hyperbolic systems with time-dependent coefficients whose time-derivatives are integrable over the real line. More precisely, it will be shown that the solutions are asymptotically free if the coefficients are stable in the sense of the Riemann integrability as time goes to infinity, while each nontrivial solution is never asymptotically free provided that the coefficients are not R-stable as times goes to infinity. As a by-product, the scattering operator can be constructed. It is expected that the results obtained in the present paper would be brought into the study of the asymptotic behaviour of Kirchhoff systems.