The solution of the Kato problem for degenerate elliptic operators with Gaussian bounds

Abstract

We prove the Kato conjecture for degenerate elliptic operators in R^n. More precisely, we consider the divergence form operator L_w = -1/w div (wA) grad, where w is a Muckenhoupt A_2 weight and A is a complex valued n x n matrix which is bounded and uniformly elliptic. We show that if the associated semigroup satisfies Gaussian upper bounds, then the Kato square root estimate holds.