Complex multiplicative perturbations of elliptic operators: heat kernel bounds and holomorphic functional calculus (Q1854080)

Let \((X,d)\) be a metric space, \(\mu \) a measure on \(X\), \(A\) a linear operator on \(L^2(X,\mu)\) such that \(-A\) generates an analytic semigroup \(e^{-tA}\), and \(b\in L^\infty (X,\mu)\) a function whose real part is bounded below by a positive constant. Under some additional assumptions on \(A\) and \(b\), the operator \(-bA\) also generates an analytic semigroup \(e^{-tbA}\). In this interesting paper, the authors establish the following three results for such \(b\) and \(A\). (1) If the semigroup \(e^{-tA}\) has a kernel \(p_t(x,y)\) which satisfies \[ 0\leq p_t(x,y) \leq C t^{-\alpha } \exp (-c d(x,y)^2/t)\tag{*} \] for a.e. \(x,y\in X\) and all \(t>0\), then the semigroup \(e^{-tbA}\) has a kernel \(k_t(x,y)\) whose modulus \(|k_t(x,y)|\) also satisfies (*) (possibly with different \(c\) and \(C\)). (2) If \(X=\mathbb{R}^n\) and \(A\) is a second order uniformly elliptic operator whose coefficients are real and Hölder-continuous, then \(k_t(x,y)\) is in \(C^{1,\eta }(\mathbb{R}^n)\) for all \(\eta \in (0,1)\), and the spatial derivatives \(\nabla _x k_t(x,y)\) as well as their Hölder bounds also satisfy (*). (3) If \(X\) and \(A\) are as in (2) and, in addition, \(A\) is of divergence type and its coefficients are sufficiently smooth, then \(bA\) admits the \(H^\infty \) functional calculus on each \(L^p(X,\mu)\), \(1<p<\infty \). These results are extensions of the ones obtained recently by \textit{A. McIntosh} and \textit{A. Nahmod} [Math. Scand. 87, 287-319 (2000)] for the operator \(-b\Delta \) on \(L^2(\mathbb{R}^n)\).