POLYNOMIAL STABILITY FOR WEAKLY COUPLED SYSTEM WITH PARTIAL CONTROLS*

We study the stability of general weakly coupled systems subject to a reduced number of local or boundary controls. We show that, under Kalman's rank condition, the exponential stability of the underlying scalar equation implies polynomial stability of the full coupled system. Moreover, the decay rate remains unchanged regardless of the number of equations in the system. The proof relies on resolvent estimates and a clever exploitation of Kalman's rank condition to ensure effective transmission of damping across the coupled equations. The abstract result is applied to several concrete models, including systems of wave equations with local viscous, local viscoelastic, or boundary damping; systems of plate equations with internal damping; and thermoelastic systems of type III. Moreover, the optimality of the decay rate is established via spectral analysis.