Approximation of the exponential of a diffusion operator with multiscale coefficients (Q2258218)

The article under review discusses certain operator norm estimates for multiscale homogenization problems for the heat equation. More precisely, the author derives the estimate \((*) \quad\quad\quad \| e^{-tA_\epsilon}-e^{-tA_0}\|_{L\big(L^2\big(\mathbb{R}^d\big)\big)}\leq c_0 \sqrt{\epsilon}, \quad t\geq 0,\quad \epsilon\in (0,1), \) where \(\|\cdot\|_{L\big(L^2\big(\mathbb{R}^d\big)\big)}\) refers to the operator norm in \(L\big(L^2\big(\mathbb{R}^d\big)\big)\), \((e^{-tA_\epsilon})_{t\geq 0}\) and \((e^{-tA_0})_{t\geq 0}\) denote the semigroups generated by the respective differential expressions \(-A_\epsilon = \text{div}\) \(a_\epsilon\text{grad}\) and \(-A_0=\text{div}\) \(a_0\, \text{grad}\) on \(\mathbb{R}^d,\) which -- as usual -- are properly defined by the respective quadratic forms. The coefficient \(a_0\) is derived via (standard) reiterated homogenization formulae involving \(a: ([-1/2,1/2)^d)^2\to \mathbb{R}^{d\times d}\) being bounded below and above as well as satisfying a Lipschitz estimate with respect to the first variable with corresponding constant uniformly in the second variable; \(a\), periodically extended, also gives \(a_\epsilon(x):=a\big(\frac{x}{\epsilon},\frac{x}{\epsilon^2}\big)\). The main result of the present paper is estimate \((*)\) with \(c_0\) depending on the spatial dimension \(d\), the boundedness constants of \(a\), as well as its Lipschitz constant. In Section 3, the author reduces \((*)\) to a corresponding estimate for the norm \(\|\cdot\|_{L\big(H^1\big(\mathbb{R}^d\big),L^2\big(\mathbb{R}^d\big)\big)}\). The main technical tool (Lemma 3) presented in Section 4 for obtaining this estimate discusses the so-called shifted first approximation. In turn, the proof of Lemma 3 is sketched in Section 7. The paper is a good read for those being experts in the field. The generalizations to the case of multiscale homogenization with more than \(2\) different scales is sketched in the concluding section.