Elliptic systems generating a positive semigroup are decoupled

We show that the semigroup associated to a second-order elliptic system is positive if and only if the differential equations are essentially decoupled and the coefficients are real-valued. This means the system can be replaced by an equivalent decoupled system (which defines the same semigroup). Instead of matrix coefficients we more generally consider operator-valued coefficients, which leads to interesting additional difficulties with respect to Banach space valued integration.