We give null controllability results for some degenerate parabolic equations in non divergence form with a drift term in one space dimension. In particular, the coefficient of the second order term may degenerate at the extreme points of the space domain. For this purpose, we obtain an observability inequality for the adjoint problem using suitable Carleman estimates.

The American Mathematical Society

: We consider a parabolic problem with degeneracy in the interior of the spatial domain, and we focus on Carleman estimates for the associated adjoint problem. The novelty of interior degeneracy does not let us adapt previous Carleman estimates to our situation. As an application, observability inequalities are established.