A class of quasicontractive semigroups acting on Hardy and weighted Hardy spaces

This paper studies semigroups of operators on Hardy and Dirichlet spaces whose generators are differential operators of order greater than one. The theory of forms is used to provide conditions for the generation of semigroups by second order differential operators. Finally, a class of more general weighted Hardy spaces is considered and necessary and sufficient conditions are given for an operator of the form \(f \mapsto Gf^{(n_0)}\) (for holomorphic G and arbitrary \(n_0\)) to generate a semigroup of quasicontractions.