Observability inequalities for heat equations with potentials

Abstract: This paper is mainly concerned with the observability inequalities for heat equations with time-dependent Lipschtiz potentials. The observability inequality for heat equations asserts that the total energy of a solution is bounded above by the energy localized in a subdomain with an observability constant. For a bounded measurable potential $V = V(x,t)$, the factor in the observability constant arising from the Carleman estimate is best known to be $\exp(C|V|{\infty}^{2/3})$ (even for time-independent potentials). In this paper, we show that, for Lipschtiz potentials, this factor can be replaced by $\exp(C(|\nabla V|{\infty}^{1/2} +|\partial_tV|{\infty}^{1/3} ))$, which improves the previous bound $\exp(C|V|{\infty}^{2/3})$ in some typical scenarios. As a consequence, with such a Lipschitz potential, we obtain a quantitative regular control in a null controllability problem. In addition, for the one-dimensional heat equation with some time-independent bounded measurable potential $V = V(x)$, we obtain the optimal observability constant.