  The aim of this paper is twofold: (1) On the one hand, the paper revisits the
spectral analysis of semigroups in a general Banach space setting. It presents
some new and more general versions, and provides comprehensible proofs, of
classical results such as the spectral mapping theorem, some (quantified)
Weyl's Theorems and the Krein-Rutman Theorem. Motivated by evolution PDE
applications, the results apply to a wide and natural class of generators which
split as a dissipative part plus a more regular part, without assuming any
symmetric structure on the operators nor Hilbert structure on the space, and
give some growth estimates and spectral gap estimates for the associated
semigroup. The approach relies on some factorization and summation arguments
reminiscent of the Dyson-Phillips series in the spirit of those used in
[87,82,48,81]. (2) On the other hand, we present the semigroup spectral
analysis for three important classes of "growth-fragmentation" equations,
namely the cell division equation, the self-similar fragmentation equation and
the McKendrick-Von Foerster age structured population equation. By showing that
these models lie in the class of equations for which our general semigroup
analysis theory applies, we prove the exponential rate of convergence of the
solutions to the associated remarkable profile for a very large and natural
class of fragmentation rates. Our results generalize similar estimates obtained
in \cite{MR2114128,MR2536450} for the cell division model with (almost)
constant total fragmentation rate and in \cite{MR2832638,MR2821681} for the
self-similar fragmentation equation and the cell division equation restricted
to smooth and positive fragmentation rate and total fragmentation rate which
does not increase more rapidly than quadratically. It also improves the
convergence results without rate obtained in \cite{MR2162224,MR2114413} which
have been established under similar assumptions to those made in the present
work.
