The submartingale problem for a class of degenerate elliptic operators

We consider the degenerate elliptic operator acting on ${C^2_b}$ functions on 0,∞) ^d : $$\mathcal{L}f(x)=\sum_{i=1}^d a_i(x) x_i^{\alpha_i} \frac{\partial^2 f}{\partial x_i^2} (x) +\sum_{i=1}^d b_i(x) \frac{\partial f}{\partial x_i}(x), $$ where the a _i are continuous functions that are bounded above and below by positive constants, the b _i are bounded and measurable, and the ${\alpha_i\in (0,1)}$ . We impose Neumann boundary conditions on the boundary of 0,∞) ^d . There will not be uniqueness for the submartingale problem corresponding to ${\mathcal{L}}$ . If we consider, however, only those solutions to the submartingale problem for which the process spends 0 time on the boundary, then existence and uniqueness for the submartingale problem for ${\mathcal{L}}$ holds within this class. Our result is equivalent to establishing weak uniqueness for the system of stochastic differential equations $$ {\rm d}X_t^i=\sqrt{2a_i(X_t)} (X_t^i)^{\alpha_i/2}{\rm d}W^i_t + b_i(X_t) {\rm d}t + {\rm d}L_t^{X^i},\quad X^i_t \geq 0, $$ where ${W_t^i}$ are independent Brownian motions and ${L^{X_i}_t}$ is a local time at 0 for X ⁱ .