Uniqueness in a doubly characteristic Cauchy problem (Q583489)

The main background for the investigations of this paper is given by a paper of \textit{F. Treves} [Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 46, 229-233 (1974; Zbl 0297.35048)] and a paper of \textit{B. Birkeland} and \textit{J. Persson} [J. Differ. Equations 30, 64-88 (1978; Zbl 0361.35039)]. The authors start with a discussion of Carleman estimates and a corresponding uniqueness result for differential equations \[ (\partial /\partial x-a(x)\partial /\partial y)(\partial /\partial x+a(x)\partial /\partial y)u+b(x)\partial u/\partial y=0. \] Then they specialize to the equation \[ (\partial /\partial x+ax^ k\partial /\partial y)(\partial /\partial x-ax^ k\partial /\partial y)u-cx^{k-1}\partial u/\partial y=0 \] and discuss uniqueness in the class \(C^ m\). In the last section they give an extension of results of Birkeland and Persson to differential equations \[ u_{xx}-a(x)u_{xy}-b(x)u_{yy}-c(x)u_ x-d(x)u_ y-e(x)u=0. \] They show how uniqueness in the class of distributions can be obtained from uniqueness in the class \(C^ m\), for some \(m\geq 2\).