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Nonoscillation and Stability of the Second Order Ordinary Differential Equations with a Damping Term

In this paper we consider the linear ordinary equation of the second order $$ L x(t)\equiv \ddot{x}(t) +a(t)\dot{x}(t)+b(t)x(t)=f(t), \eqno{(1)} $$ and the corresponding homogeneous equation $$ \ddot{x}(t) +a(t)\dot{x}(t)+b(t)x(t)=0. \eqno{(2)} $$ Note that $[α,β]$ is called a nonoscillation interval if every nontrivial solution has at most one zero on this interval. Many investigations which seem to have no connection such as differential inequalities, the Polia-Mammana decomposition (i.e. representation of the operator $L$ in the form of products of the first order differential operators), unique solvability of the interpolation problems, kernels oscillation, separation of zeros, zones of Lyapunov's stability and some others have a certain common basis - nonoscillation. Presumably Sturm was the first to consider the two problems which naturally appear here: to develop corollaries of nonoscillation and to find methods to check nonoscillation. In this paper we obtain several tests for nonoscillation on the semiaxis and apply them to propose new results on asymptotic properties and the exponential stability of the second order equation (2). Using the Floquet representations and upper and lower estimates of nonoscillation intervals of oscillatory solutions we deduce results on the exponential and Lyapunov's stability and instability of equation (2).