I would like to illustrate my question with an example: It is well-known that $\Delta$ is the generator of a strongly continuous semigroup $(T(t))$ on $L^2(\mathbb R^n),$ i.e. the heat-semigroup. It is also known that if one has a strongly continuous semigroup and the domain of the generator is the entire Banach space that this is equivalent to the semigroup being uniformly continuous. Because the domain of $\Delta$ is the Sobolev space $W^{2,2}$ the heat-semigroup is therefore not uniformly continuous. Now, consider $X$ a closed subspace of $L^2(\mathbb R^d).$ Are there sufficient and necessary conditions on $X$ such that $T(t):X \rightarrow L^2(\mathbb R^d)$ is uniformly continuous, i.e. $\lim_{t \downarrow 0}\sup_{x \in X; \left\lVert x \right\rVert=1} \left\lVert (T(t)-\operatorname{id})x \right\rVert=0?$ This is true if $X$ is finite-dimensional and false if $X=L^2(\mathbb R^d)$ but what happens for the spaces "in between"? I would prefer to get some understanding of this situation in the general case and not only for the heat semigroup, but if there is a nice characterization for the heat semigroup then this would qualify as an answer. Thank you!