Some remarks on degenerate hypoelliptic Ornstein-Uhlenbeck operators

Abstract

We study degenerate hypoelliptic Ornstein-Uhlenbeck operators in $L^2$ spaces with respect to invariant measures. The purpose of this article is to show how recent results on general quadratic operators apply to the study of degenerate hypoelliptic Ornstein-Uhlenbeck operators. We first show that some known results about the spectral and subelliptic properties of Ornstein-Uhlenbeck operators may be directly recovered from the general analysis of quadratic operators with zero singular spaces. We also provide new resolvent estimates for hypoelliptic Ornstein-Uhlenbeck operators. We show in particular that the spectrum of these non-selfadjoint operators may be very unstable under small perturbations and that their resolvents can blow-up in norm far away from their spectra. Furthermore, we establish sharp resolvent estimates in specific regions of the resolvent set which enable us to prove exponential return to equilibrium.