Diffusion phenomenon in Hilbert spaces and applications

We prove an abstract version of the striking diffusion phenomenon that offers a strong connection between the asymptotic behavior of abstract parabolic and dissipative hyperbolic equations. An important aspect of our approach is that we use in a natural way spectral analysis without involving complicated resolvent estimates. Our proof of the diffusion phenomenon does not use the individual behavior of solutions; instead we show that only their difference matters. We estimate the Hilbert norm of the difference in terms of the Hilbert norm of solutions to the parabolic problems, which allows us to transfer the decay from the parabolic to the hyperbolic problem. The application of these estimates to operators with Markov property combined with a weighted Nash inequality yields explicit and sharp decay rates for hyperbolic problems with variable (x-dependent) coefficients in exterior domains. Our method provides new insight in this area of extensive research which was not well understood until now.