Carleman estimates with two large parameters and applications (Q2708676)

In recent years the Carleman estimates have been used to prove the unique continuation for principally scalar systems of partial differential equations. On the other hand, there are systems the principal part of which can not be diagonalized. For such systems the uniqueness result has been studied in the case of constant coefficients in the principal part. In this paper, by using differential quadratic forms and a special strongly pseudo-convex function, the authors derive the Carleman estimates with two large parameters for general second-order elliptic, parabolic, and some hyperbolic partial differential operators with variable coefficients. As an application the authors prove unique continuation theorems for the equations of linear thermoelasticity and thermoelastic plates. This paper improves the earlier related results.NEWLINENEWLINEFor the entire collection see [Zbl 0956.00042].