Session UO1 - Reconnection, Nonlinear Phenomena, and Turbulence.
ORAL session, Thursday morning, October 26
Room 301AB, Qu\'{e}bec City Convention Centre
A sufficient condition for the linear stability of nonautonomous dissipative mechanical systems with circulatory forces is derived. It is applied to autonomous systems transformed to nonautonomous ones by a time-dependent orthogonal transformation. This allows to obtain sufficient stability conditions in case the perturbed potential energy can have negetive values. This is, in particular, of importance for plasma equilibria with sheared flows. The nearness of the sufficient condition to necessity is discussed for a particular example.