Robustness of strongly and polynomially stable semigroups (Q1760170)

A strongly continuous semigroup with infinitesimal generator \(A\) is \textit{polynomially stable} if it is uniformly bounded, the imaginary axis belongs to \(\rho(A)\), and \[ \|S(t)A^{-1}\| \leq {M \over t^{1/\alpha}}, \quad t > 0, \] where \(M, \alpha > 0\). It follows that \(\sigma(A)\) is contained in the open left half-plane, although \(\sigma(A)\) may approach the imaginary axis asymptotically (that is, the distance between the two sets may be zero). This type of semigroup is encountered when applying pole placement to a uniformly bounded group with an infinite number of eigenvalues on the imaginary axis; one can shift the eigenvalues to the left but not uniformly, so that the eigenvalues of the perturbed operator approach the imaginary axis asymptotically and exponential stability is unattainable. However, under certain conditions the perturbed semigroup is polynomially stable. The object of this paper is to characterize classes of bounded perturbations \(\Delta\) such that \((a)\) \(\sigma(A + \Delta)\) is contained in the open left half-plane, \((b)\) the semigroup generated by \(A + \Delta\) is strongly stable and polynomially stable. The emphasis is on the particular case where the space is Hilbert and \(\Delta = BC\) with \(B, C\) bounded; the conditions on the perturbation involve the norms \(\|(-A)^\beta B\|\) and \(\|(-A^*)^\gamma C^*\|\) for suitable \(\beta, \gamma \geq 0\). The results are applied to stabilization of a one-dimensional wave equation.