Some algebraic properties of the hyperbolic systems

The technique of quasi-symmetrizer has been applied to the well-posedness of the Cauchy problem for scalar operators [10], [13] and linear systems [5], [15], [4], and to the propagation of analitycity for solutions to semi-linear systems [6]. In all these works, it is assumed that the principal symbol depends only on the time variable. In this note we illustrate, in some special cases, a new property of the quasi-symmetrizer which allows us to generalize the result in [6] to semi-linear systems with coefficients depending also on the space variables [21]. Such a property is closely connected with some interesting inequalities on the eigenvalues of a hyperbolic matrix. We expect that this technique applies also to other problems.