Birkhoff–Kellogg type results in product spaces and their application to differential systems

Abstract We provide a new version of the well-known Birkhoff–Kellogg invariant-direction Theorem in product spaces. Our results concern operator systems and give the existence of component-wise eigenvalues, instead of scalar eigenvalues as in the classical case, that have corresponding eigenvectors with all components nontrivial and localized by their norm. We also show that, when applied to nonlinear eigenvalue problems for differential equations, this localization property of the eigenvectors provides, in turn, qualitative properties of the solutions. This is illustrated in two contexts of systems of PDEs and ODEs. We show the applicability of our theoretical results with two explicit examples.