In this article, we study the observability (or equivalently, the controllability) of some subelliptic evolution equations depending on their step. This sheds light on the speed of propagation of these equations, notably in the ‘degenerated directions’ of the subelliptic structure.

First, for any $\gamma \geq 1$ , we establish a resolvent estimate for the Baouendi–Grushin-type operator $\Delta _{\gamma }=\partial _x^2+\left \lvert x\right \rvert ^{2\gamma }\partial _y^2$ , which has step $\gamma +1$ . We then derive consequences for the observability of the Schrödinger-type equation $i\partial _tu-\left (-\Delta _{\gamma }\right )^{s}u=0$ , where $s\in \mathbb N$ . We identify three different cases: depending on the value of the ratio $(\gamma +1)/s$ , observability may hold in arbitrarily small time or only for sufficiently large times or may even fail for any time.

As a corollary of our resolvent estimate, we also obtain observability for heat-type equations $\partial _tu+\left (-\Delta _{\gamma }\right )^su=0$ and establish a decay rate for the damped wave equation associated with $\Delta _{\gamma }$ .

We improve a previous result about the local energy decay for the damped wave equation on $\mathbb{R}^{d}$. The problem is governed by a Laplacian associated with a long-range perturbation of the flat metric and a short-range absorption index. Our purpose is to recover the decay ${\mathcal{O}}(t^{-d+\unicode[STIX]{x1D700}})$ in the weighted energy spaces. The proof is based on uniform resolvent estimates, given by an improved version of the dissipative Mourre theory. In particular, we have to prove the limiting absorption principle for the powers of the resolvent with inserted weights.

We consider a damped abstract second order evolution equation with an additionalvanishing damping of Kelvin–Voigt type. Unlike the earlier work by Zuazua and Ervedoza, wedo not assume the operator defining the main damping to be bounded. First, using aconstructive frequency domain method coupled with a decomposition of frequencies and theintroduction of a new variable, we show that if the limit system is exponentially stable,then this evolutionary system is uniformly − with respect to the calibration parameter −exponentially stable. Afterwards, we prove uniform polynomial and logarithmic decayestimates of the underlying semigroup provided such decay estimates hold for the limitsystem. Finally, we discuss some applications of our results; in particular, the case ofboundary damping mechanisms is accounted for, which was not possible in the earlier workmentioned above.

We prove a uniformcontrol as $z\,\to \,0$ for the resolvent ${{(P-z)}^{-1}}$ of long range perturbations $P$ of the Euclidean Laplacian in divergence form by combining positive commutator estimates and properties of Riesz transforms. These estimates hold in dimension $d\,\ge \,3$ when $P$ is defined on ${{\mathbb{R}}^{d}}$ and in dimension $d\,\ge \,2$ when $P$ is defined outside a compact obstacle with Dirichlet boundary conditions.


In recent years several papers have been devoted to stabilityand smoothing properties in maximum-norm offinite element discretizations of parabolic problems.Using the theory of analytic semigroups it has been possibleto rephrase such properties as bounds for the resolventof the associated discrete elliptic operator. In all thesecases the triangulations of the spatial domain has beenassumed to be quasiuniform. In the present paper weshow a resolvent estimate, in one and two space dimensions,under weaker conditions on the triangulations than quasiuniformity.In the two-dimensional case, the bound for the resolvent containsa logarithmic factor.