Sharp Time-Decay Estimates for Fractional Heat Semigroups Associated with Polynomial Anharmonic Oscillators

Abstract

We investigate fractional heat semigroups generated by a class of anharmonic oscillators on $\mathbb R^n$ of the form $\mathcal H_{P,Q}=Q(D)+P(x),$ where $P\in\mathcal P_{2k}$ and $Q\in\mathcal P_{2\ell}$ are real-valued polynomials with anisotropic growth. Using the Weyl--Hörmander calculus associated with the natural metric determined by $(P,Q)$, we show that the fractional powers $\mathcal H_{P,Q}^s$, $s>0$, are pseudo-differential operators with symbols in adapted classes $Σ_{P,Q}^{2s}$. We prove fixed-time decay estimates for the fractional anharmonic heat semigroup $e^{-t\mathcal H_{P,Q}^s}$ on both Lebesgue and modulation spaces. In the Lebesgue setting, we establish sharp $L^p$--$L^q$ estimates for the full range $1\le p,q\le\infty$. For large time, the decay is exponential and governed by the smallest eigenvalue $λ_0$ of $\mathcal H_{P,Q}$, namely through the factor $e^{-tλ_0^s}$, while for small time the estimates reveal two distinct phase-space scales associated with the coercive growth of $P$ and $Q$, leading to anisotropic $L^p$--$L^q$ smoothing. As applications, we study nonlinear fractional heat equations associated with $\mathcal H_{P,Q}^s$. We prove local well-posedness in the supercritical Lebesgue range $ p>\frac{n(β-1)}{2\ell s},$ derive a lower blow-up rate for finite-time blow-up solutions, and obtain critical small-data global existence. We further prove global well-posedness and exponential decay for small initial data in modulation spaces. These results extend the heat semigroup theory for harmonic and model anharmonic oscillators to a broad class of anisotropic polynomial Hamiltonians.