Continuation of bicharacteristics for effectively hyperbolic operators (Q5906538)

The present paper is concerned with bicharacteristics of an effectively hyperbolic differential or pseudo-differential operator. Given a hyperbolic principal symbol \(p=p(\rho) = p(x,\xi)\) and an effectively hyperbolic characteristic point \(\widehat{\rho} = (\widehat{x},\widehat{\xi}) \in T^*\mathbb{R}^{n+1}\), we consider bicharacteristics \(\rho = \rho(s)\) tending to \(\widehat{\rho}\) as \(s \uparrow + \infty\) or \(s \downarrow - \infty\). Our main purpose is to prove the following two facts: There are exactly four such bicharacteristics. Two of them are incoming toward the reference point \(\widehat{\rho}\) with respect to the parameter \(s\), and the other two are outgoing. Each one of the incoming (resp. outgoing) bicharacteristics is naturally continued to the other one, and the resultig two curves are regular, \(C^ \infty\) or analytic corresponding to the assumption on the principal symbol.