OBSERVABILITY OF BAOUENDI–GRUSHIN-TYPE EQUATIONS THROUGH RESOLVENT ESTIMATES

In this article, we study the observability (or equivalently, the controllability) of some subelliptic evolution equations depending on their step. This sheds light on the speed of propagation of these equations, notably in the ‘degenerated directions’ of the subelliptic structure. First, for any $\gamma \geq 1$ , we establish a resolvent estimate for the Baouendi–Grushin-type operator $\Delta _{\gamma }=\partial _x^2+\left \lvert x\right \rvert ^{2\gamma }\partial _y^2$ , which has step $\gamma +1$ . We then derive consequences for the observability of the Schrödinger-type equation $i\partial _tu-\left (-\Delta _{\gamma }\right )^{s}u=0$ , where $s\in \mathbb N$ . We identify three different cases: depending on the value of the ratio $(\gamma +1)/s$ , observability may hold in arbitrarily small time or only for sufficiently large times or may even fail for any time. As a corollary of our resolvent estimate, we also obtain observability for heat-type equations $\partial _tu+\left (-\Delta _{\gamma }\right )^su=0$ and establish a decay rate for the damped wave equation associated with $\Delta _{\gamma }$ .