Semiclassical asymptotics of the spectrum of hypoelliptic operators on a foliated manifold (Q1916679)

Let \(M\) be a closed manifold with a foliation \(\mathcal F\) and a holonomy-invariant measure \(dx\) and \(A\) be a formally selfadjoint differential operator of order \(m> 0\) and \(B\) a selfadjoint pseudodifferential operator on \(M\) of order \(\mu> 0\). With respect to the given foliation assume that \(A\) is tangentially elliptic with a nonnegative principal symbol and \(B\) has a positive transversal principal symbol \(\sigma_B\) which is invariant under the holonomy pseudogroup on the conormal bundle of \(\mathcal F\). Moreover, in the case \(m> \mu\) the principal symbol of \(B\) is also assumed to be positive. In this case, \(A(h)= A+ h^m B\) defines for small \(h> 0\) a formally selfadjoint hypoelliptic operator on \(L^2(M, dx)\) with discrete spectrum. In this paper, the author is interested in the asymptotic behaviour of the spectral distribution function \(N_h(\lambda)\) of \(A(h)\) as \(h\to 0\). He sketches a proof of the following theorem: For the restriction of the tangential operator \(A\) to the leaf \(L(x)\) through a point \(x\in M\) let \(e_{L(x)}(x, y, \lambda)\) be the Schwartz kernel of the spectral projector corresponding to the interval \((- \infty, \lambda]\). Denote by \(e(x, \lambda)= e_{L(x)}(x, x, \lambda)\) and by \(V(x)\) the volume of the ``balls'' \(\{\xi: \sigma_B(x, \xi)\leq 1\}\) in the conormal space \(N^*_x {\mathcal F}\). Then \[ N_h(\lambda)= h^{- q} \int_M ((\lambda- \tau)^{q/m} d_\tau e(x, \cdot)) V(x) dx+ o(h^{- q}), \] where \(q\) is the codimension of the filtration \(\mathcal F\).