Hypoellipticity without loss of derivatives for Fedii's type operators

Abstract

We prove that second order linear operators on $\mathbb{R}^{n+m}$ of the form $L(x,y,D_x,D_y) = L_1(x,D_x) + g(x) L_2(y,D_y)$, where $L_1$ and $L_2$ satisfy Morimoto's super-logarithmic estimates and $g$ is smooth, nonnegative, and vanishes only at the origin in $\mathbb{R}^n$ (but to any arbitrary order) are hypoelliptic without loss of derivarives. We also show examples in which our hypotheses are necessary for hypoellipticity.