On sectoriality of degenerate elliptic operators

Let $c_{kl} \in W^{1,\infty }(\Omega , \mathbb{C})$ for all $k,l \in \{1, \ldots , d\};$ and $\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^{d}$ be open with uniformly $C^{2}$ boundary. We consider the divergence form operator $A_p = - \sum \nolimits _{k,l=1}^{d} \partial _l (c_{kl} \partial _k)$ in $L_p(\Omega )$ when the coefficient matrix satisfies $(C(x) \xi , \xi ) \in \Sigma _\theta$ for all $x \in \Omega$ and $\xi \in \mathbb{C}^{d}$ , where $\Sigma _\theta$ be the sector with vertex 0 and semi-angle $\theta$ in the complex plane. We show that a sectorial estimate holds for $A_p$ for all $p$ in a suitable range. We then apply these estimates to prove that the closure of $-A_p$ generates a holomorphic semigroup under further assumptions on the coefficients. The contractivity and consistency properties of these holomorphic semigroups are also considered.