  We investigate rates of decay for $C_0$-semigroups on Hilbert spaces under
assumptions on the resolvent growth of the semigroup generator. Our main
results show that one obtains the best possible estimate on the rate of decay,
that is to say an upper bound which is also known to be a lower bound, under a
comparatively mild assumption on the growth behaviour. This extends several
statements obtained by Batty, Chill and Tomilov (J. Eur. Math. Soc., vol.
18(4), pp. 853-929, 2016). In fact, for a large class of semigroups our
condition is not only sufficient but also necessary for this optimal estimate
to hold. Even without this assumption we obtain a new quantified asymptotic
result which in many cases of interest gives a sharper estimate for the rate of
decay than was previously available, and for semigroups of normal operators we
are able to describe the asymptotic behaviour exactly. We illustrate the
strength of our theoretical results by using them to obtain sharp estimates on
the rate of energy decay for a wave equation subject to viscoelastic damping at
the boundary.
