Well-posedness, smooth dependence and centre manifold reduction for a semilinear hyperbolic system from laser dynamics

We prove existence, uniqueness, regularity and smooth dependence of the weak solution on the initial data for a semilinear, first order, dissipative hyperbolic system with discontinuous coefficients. Such hyperbolic systems have successfully been used to model the dynamics of distributed feedback multisection semiconductor lasers. We show that in a function space of continuous functions the weak solutions generate a smooth skew product semiflow. Using slow fast structure and dissipativity we prove the existence of smooth exponentially attracting invariant centre manifolds for the non‐autonomous model. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.