This work is devoted to the study of uncertainty principles for finite combinations of Hermite functions. We establish some spectral inequalities for control subsets that are thick with respect to some unbounded densities growing almost linearly at infinity, and provide quantitative estimates, with respect to the energy level of the Hermite functions seen as eigenfunctions of the harmonic oscillator, for the constants appearing in these spectral estimates. These spectral inequalities allow us to derive the null-controllability in any positive time for evolution equations enjoying specific regularizing effects. More precisely, for a given index $\frac {1}{2} \leq \mu <1$, we deduce sufficient geometric conditions on control subsets to ensure the null-controllability of evolution equations enjoying regularizing effects in the symmetric Gelfand–Shilov space $S^{\mu }_{\mu }(\mathbb {R}^{n})$. These results apply in particular to derive the null-controllability in any positive time for evolution equations associated to certain classes of hypoelliptic non-self-adjoint quadratic operators, or to fractional harmonic oscillators.

We study the partial Gelfand–Shilov regularizing effect and the exponential decay for the solutions to evolution equations associated with a class of accretive non-selfadjoint quadratic operators, which fail to be globally hypoelliptic on the whole phase space. By taking advantage of the associated Gevrey regularizing effects, we study the null-controllability of parabolic equations posed on the whole Euclidean space associated with this class of possibly non-globally hypoelliptic quadratic operators. We prove that these parabolic equations are null-controllable in any positive time from thick control subsets. This thickness property is known to be a necessary and sufficient condition for the null-controllability of the heat equation posed on the whole Euclidean space. Our result shows that this geometric condition turns out to be a sufficient one for the null-controllability of a large class of quadratic differential operators.