Abstract. We give a short proof showing that the growth bound of a positive semigroup on Lp(µ) equals the spectral bound of its generator. It is based on a new boundedness theorem for positive convolution operators on Lp(Lq). We also give a counterexample, showing that Gearhart's result does not extend from Hilbert spaces to Lp(µ)-spaces.
The resultsand the growth bound of T t is given by ω(T t ) = inf{ω : ∃C < ∞ with T t ≤ Ce ωt for all t ≥ 0}.The following theorem was proved in [9].The case p = 2 is due to Gearhart and Greiner-Nagel, the case p = 1 is due to Derndinger (see [7], [8], or [3], Theorems 9.5 and 9.7), but the general case remained an open problem for about 10 years. The proof in [9] used a new spectral mapping theorem for the evolutionary semigroup I ⊗ T t on L q (L p ) by Latushkin and Montgomery-Smith [5] and an extrapolation procedure for the Yosida approximation of T t . In [6] S. Montgomery-Smith simplified the proof by replacing the extrapolation procedure by a direct resolvent estimate.In this note we give a new and simpler proof of Theorem 1 that is based on a boundedness result for positive convolutions on mixed norm spaces L p (L q ), and which may be of independent interest (see Theorem 2 below). With this convolution result we can reduce Theorem 1 to a well-known characterization of the spectral bound in terms of weak integrability ([3], Theorem 7.4).Finally, we point out that recent counterexamples concerning stability of semigroups (see e.g. [1]) can be "transplanted" onto L p -spaces. At the end of this note