Regularity of Semigroups via the Asymptotic Behaviour at Zero

An interesting result by T. Kato and A. Pazy says that a contractive semigroup (T(t)) on a uniformly convex space X is holomorphic iff limsup_{t \downarrow 0} ||T(t)-Id|| < 2. We study extensions of this result which are valid on arbitrary Banach spaces for semigroups which are not necessarily contractive. This allows us to prove a general extrapolation result for holomorphy of semigroups on interpolation spaces of exponent {\theta} in (0,1). As application we characterize boundedness of the generator of a cosine family on a UMD-space by a zero-two law. Moreover, our methods can be applied to R-sectoriality: We obtain a characterization of maximal regularity by the behaviour of the semigroup at zero and show extrapolation results.