Analysis

In a recent article, Arendt and ter Elst have shown that every sectorial form is in a natural way associated with the generator of an analytic strongly continuous semigroup, even if the form fails to be closable. As an intermediate step they have introduced so-called j-elliptic forms, which generalises the concept of elliptic forms in the sense of Lions. We push their analysis forward in that we discuss some perturbation and convergence results for semigroups associated with j-elliptic forms. In particular, we study convergence with respect to the trace norm or other Schatten norms. We apply our results to Laplace operators and Dirichlet-to-Neumann-type operators.

A well-known result going back to the 1930s states that all bounded linear operators mapping scalar-valued L 1-spaces into L ∞-spaces are kernel operators and that in fact this relation induces an isometric isomorphism between the space of such operators and the space of all bounded kernels. We extend this result to the case of spaces of vector-valued functions. A recent result due to Arendt and Thomaschewski states that the local operators acting on L p -spaces of functions with values in separable Banach spaces are precisely the multiplication operators. We extend this result to non-separable dual spaces. Moreover, we relate positivity and other order properties of the operators to corresponding properties of the representations.

Convergence of operators acting on a given Hilbert space is an old and well studied topic in operator theory. The idea of introducing a related notion for operators acting on arying spaces is natural. However, it seems that the first results in this direction have been obtained only recently, to the best of our knowledge. Here we consider sectorial operators on scales of Hilbert spaces. We define a notion of convergence that generalises convergence of the resolvents in operator norm to the case when the operators act on different spaces and show that this kind of convergence is compatible with the functional calculus of the operator and moreover implies convergence of the spectrum. Finally, we present examples for which this convergence can be checked, including convergence of coefficients of parabolic problems. Convergence of a manifold (roughly speaking consisting of thin tubes) towards the manifold's skeleton graph plays a prominent role, being our main application.

We consider a diffusion process on the edges of a finite network and allow for feedback effects between different, possibly non-adjacent edges. This generalizes the setting that is common in the literature, where the only considered interactions take place at the boundary, i. e., in the nodes of the network. We discuss well-posedness of the associated initial value problem as well as contractivity and positivity properties of its solutions. Finally, we discuss qualitative properties that can be formulated in terms of invariance of linear subspaces of the state space, i. e., of symmetries of the associated physical system. Applications to a neurobiological model as well as to a system of linear Schroedinger equations on a quantum graph are discussed.