Elliptic $L^p$ Carleman estimates near the boundary, quantitative unique continuation, and applications to controllability and stabilization

Abstract

This article deals with quantitative unique continuation results up to and from the boundary for second-order elliptic equations with variable coefficients via $L^p$ Carleman estimates. The coefficients in the leading part are assumed to be Lipschitz continuous, and the potentials in the lower order term are allowed to belong to almost scale-invariant $L^q$ spaces. As applications, following the method of Lebeau and Robbiano, we obtain a spectral estimate which yields the interior null controllability of the associated parabolic equation, with an explicit dependence of the control cost on the potential. We also prove the logarithmic decay of the energy for damped wave equations with unbounded dampings and potentials.

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