Analysis of degenerate elliptic operators of Grušin type (Q944234)

The authors analyse degenerate, second-order, elliptic operators \(H\) in divergence form on \(L_{2}({\mathbb R}^{n} \times {\mathbb R}^{m})\). It is assumed that the coefficients are real symmetric and \(a_{1} H_{\delta} \geq H \geq a_{2} H_{\delta}\) for some \(a_{1}\), \(a_{2} > 0\) where \[ H_\delta=-{\nabla}_{x_1}\cdot(c_{\delta_{1}}, \delta'_{1}(x_1),\nabla_{x_1})-c_{\delta_{2}}, \delta'_{2}(x_1)\,\nabla_{x_2}^2. \] Here \(x_{1} \in {\mathbb R} ^{n}\), \(x_{2} \in {\mathbb R}^{m}\) and \(c_{\delta_i,\delta_i^\prime}\) are positive measurable functions such that \(c_{\delta_i, \delta_i^\prime}(x)\) behaves like \({| x| ^{\delta_{i}}}\) as \(x \rightarrow 0\) and \({| x| ^{\delta'_{i}}}\) as \(x \to \infty\) with \(\delta_1, \delta'_1 \in [0, 1 \rangle\) and \(\delta_2,\delta'_2 \geq 0\). The authors proved subelliptic estimates of \(H\), analysed Riemannian distance associated with \(H\) and the corresponding volumes. Using these estimates they proved conservativeness of the semigroup \(S_t = e^{-tH}\). For the kernel of the semigroup \(K_{t}\) the following estimate \[ 0\leq K_t(x;\,y)\leq a\,(| B(x;\,t^{1/2})| \,| B(y;\,t^{1/2})| )^{-1/2}, \] is obtained. They also discuss further implications of these bounds and give explicit examples that show the kernel is not necessarily strictly positive, nor continuous.