Gevrey well posedness for a second order weakly hyperbolic equation with non regular in time coefficients (Q875685)

Let \(Q(t,x,\xi )= \sum_{i,j=1 }^{ n } q _{ij}(t,x) \xi _{i} \xi _{j} \), \( b (t,x,\xi )= \sum_{j=1 }^{ n } b _{j} (t,x) \xi _{j} \) with \(t \in [0,T]\), \( x \in \mathbb{R} ^{n}\), \( q _{ij}\) functions which are Hölder continuous of some order \(\chi \) in \(t\) and Gevrey-regular of some index \( \sigma \) on \( \mathbb{R} ^{n}\) in \(x\). (The Gevrey-estimates are of Roumieu type and are uniform on \( \mathbb{R} ^{n}\).) Further assume that \( Q(t,x,\xi ) \geq c| \xi | ^{2}\) for some \(c>0\) and consider a function \(\alpha \) defined on \([0,T]\) which is of class \(N= m+k\) with \(m \in \mathbb{N}\) and \(k \in (0,1]\). Finally, denote \(P\) the weakly hyperbolic partial differential operator \(D _{t} ^{2} - \alpha (t) Q(t,x,D _{x})+b(t,x,D _{x})+c(t,x)\). The paper makes a detailed analysis concerning the Gevrey well-posedness of the Cauchy problem for \(P\) when the data are Gevrey regular of a certain index \(\sigma \). When \(b \) is not identically vanishing, Levi-type conditions of the form \(| \partial _{x} ^{\beta } b _{j} (t,x)| \leq C A ^{| \beta | } \beta!\alpha (t) ^{\gamma }\), have to be imposed. (\(\gamma \) is supposed to lie in \([0, 1/2]\) and the Gevrey index \(\sigma \) for well-posedness will depend on \( \gamma \).) The proofs are based on a regularization of multiple roots of the characteristic polynomial and a reduction of the regularized operator to a \(2 \times 2\) first order system.