The small-time asymptotics of the heat kernel at the cut locus (Q937830)

The main aim of the paper is to study small time asymptotics of the gradient and to Hessian of the logarithm of the heat kernel at the cut locus of a manifold. For this purpose, the author gives (as he says, in principle) complete expansions of both quantities. The leading term of expansion is related to the structure of the cut locus, e.g., conjugacy. A probabilistic interpretation in terms of Brownian bridge is obtained. An interesting result is that the the cut locus is the set of points where the Hessian blows up faster than \(1/t\). The distributional asymptotics is also studied. The distributional Hessian of the energy function (here it is one half of the square of the distance) is computed.