No label defined (Q4253602)

The authors study the degenerate elliptic operators \[ A u(x) = \sum\limits_{i,j=1}^n D_i (\psi_i(x) \psi_j(x) q_{ij} (x) D_j u(x)) + \sum\limits_{i=1}^n \gamma_i (x) D_i u(x) - \theta (x) u(x), \tag{1} \] where \(q_{ij} \in L^{\infty} (\mathbb{R}^n)\) satisfies the ellipticity condition and \(\theta (x) \geq 1\). It is proved that the operators (1) generate contractive semigroups in \(L^p (\mathbb{R}^n)\), \(1 < p \leq \infty\). The cases \(p=2\), \( p > 2\) and \(p \in (1,2)\) are considered separately. The smoothing properties of these semigroups are investigated.