Lower bounds for systems with double characteristics. (Q698312)

The main goal of this very well written paper is to obtain lower bounds for a square \((N\times N)\) formally self-adjoint system \(P\) of pseudodifferential operators of order \(m\), assuming that the principal symbol \(p_m\) is nonnegative and satisfies appropriate conditions. The authors work with two types of inequalities. One is Melin's inequality, namely for each \(\varepsilon> 0\), \(\mu< (m-1)/2\) and \(K\) compact subset of a fixed open subset \(X\) of \(\mathbb{R}^n\), there exists \(C= C_{\varepsilon,\mu,K}> 0\) so that \[ (Pu, u)\geq -\varepsilon\| u\|^2_{(m-1)/2}- C\| u\|^2_\mu \] for every \(u\in C^\infty_0(K; \mathbb{C}^N)\). The other inequality is Hörmander's, that is to say, for each compact subset \(K\) as before, there exists \(C= C_K> 0\) such that \[ (Pu, u)\geq -C_K\| u\|^2_{(m- 2)/2} \] for all \(u\in C^\infty_0(K; \mathbb{C}^N)\). As the authors point out, necessary and sufficient conditions are known for Melin's inequality to hold in the scalar case. Likewise, there are almost necessary and sufficient conditions for Hörmander's inequality to hold in the scalar case. In the case of a system, an added difficulty is to have to consider sets of zeros at two levels. On one hand, the characteristic set \[ \sum= \{(x,\xi)\in T^*(X)\setminus 0: \text{det\,}p_m(x,\xi)= 0\}, \] and also the kernel of the transformation \((p_m(x_0,\xi_0))\) for each \((x_0,\xi_0)\in T^*(X)\setminus 0\) fixed. In this respect, the authors assume roughly that the manifold \(\sum\) is symplectic, \(\text{Ker}(p_m(x_0,\xi_0))\) has constant dimension \(l\) with \(1\leq l\leq N\) and that \(\text{det}(p_m)\) vanishes exactly to order \(2l\) an the manifold \(\sum\). Carefully stated assumptions can be found in Section 2, where the authors obtain a localization for the symbol \(p_m\). Under roughly those assumptions, the authors prove in Section 3 a localization of pseudodifferential operators with double characteristics. In Section 4 the authors collect the main results of the paper, proving in particular two theorems related to systems satisfying Melin's and Hörmander's inequalities. The results are too involved to give an account here. The paper closes with a section dedicated to analyze an illustrative example, and three appendices where the authors present supplementary results.