On Landis' conjecture in the plane for some equations with sign-changing potentials (Q1998673)

The interesting paper under review deals with quantitative unique continuation properties of real-valued solutions to elliptic equations \[ \mathcal{L}u:=-\text{div}\,(A\nabla u)+W\cdot \nabla u+Vu=0 \] in the plane, where \(A=\{a_{ij}\}_{i,j=1}^2,\) \(W,V\in L^\infty_{\text{loc}}(\mathbb{R}^2)\) and the coefficients are supposed to be bounded, elliptic and Lipschitz continuous with a decaying derivative, \[ |\nabla a_{ij}(z)|\leq \mu_0 \big(1+|z|^2\big)^{-\frac{1+\varepsilon_0}{2}},\quad \mu_0,\ \varepsilon_0>0. \] Under very general assumptions on the operator \(\mathcal{L}\) the author establishes quantitative forms of the Landis conjecture. In particular, a version of the Landis conjecture is proved for solutions to the equation \(-\Delta u+Vu=0\) with a bounded potential \(V\) whose negative part exhibits polynomial decay at infinity. The proof relies on a combination of order of vanishing estimates with a suitable iteration procedure. The order of vanishing results are obtained via constructing of positive multipliers that reduces the equation to a Beltrami system. The resulting first-order equation is then analyzed by means of the similarity principle and the Hadamard three-quasi-circle theorem.