On uniform controllability of 1D transport equations in the vanishing viscosity limit

Abstract: We consider a one dimensional transport equation with varying vector field and a small viscosity coefficient, controlled by one endpoint of the interval. We give upper and lower bounds on the minimal time needed to control to zero, uniformly in the vanishing viscosity limit. We assume that the vector field varies on the whole interval except at one point. The upper/lower estimates we obtain depend on geometric quantities such as an Agmon distance and the spectral gap of an associated semiclassical Schr{\"o}dinger operator. They improve, in this particular situation, the results obtained in the companion paper [LL21]. The proofs rely on a reformulation of the problem as a uniform observability question for the semiclassical heat equation together with a fine analysis of localization of eigenfunctions both in the semiclassically allowed and forbidden regions [LL22], together with estimates on the spectral gap [HS84, All98]. Along the proofs, we provide with a construction of biorthogonal families with fine explicit bounds, which we believe is of independent interest.