Weak Poincaré inequalities for convergence rate of degenerate diffusion processes (Q2280544)

The authors introduce weak Poincaré inequalities for the symmetric and antisymmetric part of the generator to estimate the convergence rate for general degenerate diffusion semigroups. They also present a general result on the weak hypocoercivity for \(C_0\)-semigroups on Hilbert spaces. The main result of the paper applies to a large class of degenerate SDEs, and the state space of the Markov process associated to the semigroup can be very general. In particular, the result applies to degenerate spherical velocity Langevin equations. The results are important from the viewpoint of applications because solutions to SDEs studied in this paper arise, for instance, in industrial mathematics as so-called fiber laydown processes. They are used as surrogate models for the production process of nonwovens. Here, the rate of convergence to equilibrium is related to the quality of the nonwovens, and so is of practical interest. So, cases in which empirical measurements indicate slow growing potentials are also subsumed as special cases of the model considered in this paper.