Null controllability for a heat equation with a singular inverse-square potential involving the distance to the boundary function

Abstract

This article is devoted to the analysis of control properties for a heat equation with a singular potential μ/δ2, defined on a bounded C2 domain Ω⊂RN, where δ is the distance to the boundary function. More precisely, we show that for any μ≤1/4 the system is exactly null controllable using a distributed control located in any open subset of Ω, while for μ>1/4 there is no way of preventing the solutions of the equation from blowing-up. The result is obtained applying a new Carleman estimate.