Null-controllability of hypoelliptic quadratic differential equations

Abstract

We study the null-controllability of parabolic equations associated to a general class of hypoelliptic quadratic differential operators. Quadratic differential operators are operators defined in the Weyl quantization by complex-valued quadratic symbols. We consider in this work the class of accretive quadratic operators with zero singular spaces. These possibly degenerate non-selfadjoint differential operators are known to be hypoelliptic and to generate contraction semigroups which are smoothing in specific Gelfand-Shilov spaces for any positive time. Thanks to this regularizing effect, we prove by adapting the Lebeau-Robbiano method that parabolic equations associated to these operators are null-controllable in any positive time from control regions, for which null-controllability is classically known to hold in the case of the heat equation on the whole space. Some applications of this result are then given to the study of parabolic equations associated to hypoelliptic Ornstein-Uhlenbeck operators acting on weighted $L^2$ spaces with respect to invariant measures. By using the same strategy, we also establish the null-controllability in any positive time from the same control regions for parabolic equations associated to any hypoelliptic Ornstein-Uhlenbeck operator acting on the flat $L^2$ space extending in particular the known results for the heat equation or the Kolmogorov equation on the whole space.