Quantitative unique continuation for operators with partially analytic coefficients. Application to approximate control for waves

Abstract

In this article, we first prove quantitative estimates associated to the unique continuation theorems for operators with partially analytic coefficients of Tataru [Tat95, Tat99b], Robbiano–Zuily [RZ98] and Hörmander [Hör97]. We provide local stability estimates that can be propagated, leading to global ones. Then, we specify the previous results to the wave operator on a Riemannian manifold \mathcal M with boundary. For this operator, we also prove Carleman estimates and local quantitative unique continuation from and up to the boundary \partial \mathcal M . This allows us to obtain a global stability estimate from any open set \Gamma of \mathcal M or \partial \mathcal M , with the optimal time and dependence on the observation. As a first application, we compute a sharp lower estimate of the intensity of waves in the shadow of an obstacle. We also provide the cost of approximate controllability on the compact manifold \mathcal M : for any T > 2\: \mathrm {sup}_{x \in \mathcal M} \mathrm {dist}(x,\Gamma) , we can drive any data of H^1_0 \times L^2 in time T to an \varepsilon -neighborhood of zero in L^2 \times H^{-1} , with a control located in \Gamma , at cost e^{C/\varepsilon} . We finally obtain related results for the Schrödinger equation.