Spectra and semigroup smoothing for non-elliptic quadratic operators

Abstract

We study non-elliptic quadratic differential operators. Quadratic differential operators are non-selfadjoint operators defined in the Weyl quantization by complex-valued quadratic symbols. When the real part of their Weyl symbols is a non-positive quadratic form, we point out the existence of a particular linear subspace in the phase space, intrinsically associated to the Weyl symbols, called a singular space, such that when the singular space has a symplectic structure, the associated heat semigroup is smoothing in every direction of its symplectic orthogonal complement. When the Weyl symbol of such an operator is elliptic on the singular space, this space is always symplectic and we prove that the spectrum of the operator is discrete and can be described as in the globally elliptic case. We also describe the large time behavior of contraction semigroups generated by these operators.