Sharp Resolvent Estimate for the Damped-Wave Baouendi-Grushin Operator and Applications

In this article we study the semiclassical resolvent estimate for the nonselfadjoint Baouendi-Grushin operator on the two-dimensional torus T-2 = R-2/(2 pi Z)(2) with Holder dampings. The operator is subelliptic degenerating along the vertical direction at x = 0. We exhibit three different situations: (i) the damping region verifies the geometric control condition with respect to both the non-degenerate Hamiltonian flow and the vertical subelliptic flow; (ii) the undamped region contains a horizontal strip; (iii) the undamped part is a horizontal line. In all of these situations, we obtain sharp resolvent estimates. Consequently, we prove the optimal energy decay rate for the associated damped waved equations. For (i) and (iii), our results are in sharp contrast to the Laplace resolvent since the optimal bound is governed by the quasimodes in the subelliptic regime. While for (ii), the optimality is governed by the quasimodes in the elliptic regime, and the optimal energy decay rate is the same as for the classical damped wave equation on T-2. Our analysis contains the study of adapted two-microlocal semiclassical measures, construction of quasimodes and refined Birkhoff normal-form reductions in different regions of the phase-space. Of independent interest, we also obtain the propagation theorem for semiclassical measures of quasimodes microlocalized in the subelliptic regime.