Extremals of log Sobolev inequality on non-compact manifolds and Ricci soliton structures (Q1732792)

In this paper the authors establish the existence of extremals for the log Sobolev functional on complete non-compact manifolds with Ricci curvature bounded from below and strictly positive injectivity radius, under a condition near infinity. This extends a previous result by \textit{Q. S. Zhang} [J. Funct. Anal. 263, No. 7, 2051--2101 (2012; Zbl 1252.53046)] where a $C^1$ bound on the whole Riemann tensor was assumed. When the Ricci curvature is also bounded from above they get exponential decay at infinity of the extremals. As a consequence of these analytical results they establish, under the same assumptions, that non-trivial shrinking Ricci solitons support a gradient Ricci soliton structure. On the way, they prove two results of independent interest: the existence of a distance-like function with uniformly controlled gradient and Hessian on complete non-compact manifolds with bounded Ricci curvature and strictly positive injectivity radius and a general growth estimate for the norm of the soliton vector field. This latter is based on a new Toponogov-type lemma for manifolds with bounded Ricci curvature, and represents the first known growth estimate for the whole norm of the soliton field in the non-gradient case.