Carleman inequalities and unique continuation for the polyharmonic operators

Abstract

We obtain a complete characterization of $L^p-L^q$ Carleman estimates with weight $e^{v\cdot x}$ for the polyharmonic operators. Our result extends the Carleman inequalities for the Laplacian due to Kenig--Ruiz--Sogge. Consequently, we obtain new unique continuation properties of higher order Schrödinger equations relaxing the integrability assumption on the solution spaces.