Quantitative unique continuation for operators with partially analytic coefficients. Application to approximate control for waves

TL;DR

This paper establishes quantitative unique continuation estimates for operators with partially analytic coefficients, leading to new stability and controllability results for wave and Schr"odinger equations on Riemannian manifolds.

Contribution

It extends quantitative unique continuation and stability estimates to operators with partially analytic coefficients and applies these to control problems for waves and Schr"odinger equations.

Findings

Global stability estimates from boundary or interior observations.

Cost of approximate controllability with exponential dependence on precision.

Extension of Carleman estimates to boundary and interior for wave operators.

Abstract

In this article, we first prove quantitative estimates associated to the unique continuation theorems for operators with partially analytic coefficients of Tataru, Robbiano-Zuily and H\"ormander. We provide local stability estimates that can be propagated, leading to global ones. Then, we specify the previous results to the wave operator on a Riemannian manifold $\mathcal{M}$ with boundary. For this operator, we also prove Carleman estimates and local quantitative unique continuation from and up to the boundary $\partial \mathcal{M}$. This allows us to obtain a global stability estimate from any open set $\Gamma$ of $\mathcal{M}$ or $\partial \mathcal{M}$, with the optimal time and dependence on the observation. This provides the cost of approximate controllability: for any $T>2 \sup_{x \in \mathcal{M}}(dist(x,\Gamma))$, we can drive any data of $H^1_0 \times L^2$ in time $T$ to an $\varepsilon$-neighborhood of zero in $L^2 \times H^{-1}$, with a control located in $\Gamma$, at cost $e^{C/\varepsilon}$. We also obtain similar results for the Schr\"odinger equation.