Null controllability of Kolmogorov-type equations

We study the null controllability of Kolmogorov-type equations $\partial _t f + v^\gamma \partial _x f - \partial _v^2 f = u(t,x,v) 1_{\omega }(x,v)$ in a rectangle $\Omega $ , under an additive control supported in an open subset $\omega $ of $\Omega $ . For $\gamma =1$ , with periodic-type boundary conditions, we prove that null controllability holds in any positive time, with any control support $\omega $ . This improves the previous result by Beauchard and Zuazua (Ann Ins H Poincaré Anal Non Linéaire 26:1793–1815, 2009), in which the control support was a horizontal strip. With Dirichlet boundary conditions and a horizontal strip as control support, we prove that null controllability holds in any positive time if $\gamma =1$ or if $\gamma =2$ and $\omega $ contains the segment $\{v=0\}$ , and only in large time if $\gamma =2$ and $\omega $ does not contain the segment $\{v=0\}$ . Our approach, inspired from Benabdallah et al. (C R Math Acad Sci Paris 344(6):357–362, 2007), Lebeau and Robbiano (Commun Partial Differ Equ 20:335–356, 1995), is based on two key ingredients: the observability of the Fourier components of the solution of the adjoint system, uniformly with respect to the frequency, and the explicit exponential decay rate of these Fourier components.