Uniform null-controllability times for the Coron--Guerrero problems are $2$ and $2 + 2 \sqrt{2}$

Abstract

We study the uniform null-controllability, in the vanishing viscosity limit, of the transport--diffusion equation $u_t + M u_x = \varepsilon u_{xx}$ on $[0,L]$ with a Dirichlet boundary control at $x=0$. Our results concern the uniform null-controllability time $T_{\mathrm{unif}}$, defined as the infimum of the times for which the null-controllability cost remains bounded as $\varepsilon \to 0$. We determine this time exactly for both signs of the transport velocity: $T_{\mathrm{unif}} = 2 L / M$ in the positive-speed case $M>0$, and $T_{\mathrm{unif}} = (2 + 2 \sqrt{2}) L / |M|$ in the negative-speed case $M<0$. The positive-speed result disproves the conjecture $T_{\mathrm{unif}}=L/M$ suggested by Coron and Guerrero. For negative speed, the conjectured threshold had already been disproved by Lissy. Our result determines the exact threshold. We establish the lower bounds by constructing adjoint solutions that violate uniform observability below the respective thresholds. In the positive-speed case, the construction exploits the asymptotic structure of the Blaschke products and model spaces associated with the exponential family generated by the adjoint spectrum. The same model-space structure is used to reduce the upper-bound problems for both signs of $M$ to infinite-time observability inequalities, which are proved through a representation of the boundary-to-interior map and estimates of its Hilbert--Schmidt norm.