In mathematics — specifically, in the theory of partial differential equations — a semi-elliptic operator is a partial differential operator satisfying a positivity condition slightly weaker than that of being an elliptic operator. Every elliptic operator is also semi-elliptic, and semi-elliptic operators share many of the nice properties of elliptic operators: for example, much of the same existence and uniqueness theory is applicable, and semi-elliptic Dirichlet problems can be solved using the methods of stochastic analysis.
Definition A second-order partial differential operator P defined on an open subset Ω of n-dimensional Euclidean space Rn, acting on suitable functions f by
P f ( x ) = ∑ i , j = 1 n a i j ( x ) ∂ 2 f ∂ x i ∂ x j ( x ) + ∑ i = 1 n b i ( x ) ∂ f ∂ x i ( x ) + c ( x ) f ( x ) , {\displaystyle Pf(x)=\sum _{i,j=1}^{n}a_{ij}(x){\frac {\partial ^{2}f}{\partial x_{i}\,\partial x_{j}}}(x)+\sum _{i=1}^{n}b_{i}(x){\frac {\partial f}{\partial x_{i}}}(x)+c(x)f(x),}
is said to be semi-elliptic if all the eigenvalues λi(x), 1 ≤ i ≤ n, of the matrix a(x) = (aij(x)) are non-negative. (By way of contrast, P is said to be elliptic if λi(x) > 0 for all x ∈ Ω and 1 ≤ i ≤ n, and uniformly elliptic if the eigenvalues are uniformly bounded away from zero, uniformly in i and x.) Equivalently, P is semi-elliptic if the matrix a(x) is positive semi-definite for each x ∈ Ω.
References
Øksendal, Bernt K. (2003). Stochastic Differential Equations: An Introduction with Applications (Sixth ed.). Berlin: Springer. ISBN 3-540-04758-1. (See Section 9)
