Gradient estimates of Dirichlet heat semigroups and application to isoperimetric inequalities. (Q1879859)

An estimate \[ \| \nabla P_t f\| _\infty \leq C \| f\| _\infty /\sqrt{t},\qquad 0<t\leq1,\;f\geq 0 \] is obtained on a connected complete Riemannian manifold with Ricci curvature bounded below for \(P_t\) associated to \(\triangle+Z\), where \(Z\) is \(C^1\) and bounded. The originality of the paper is that the manifold may have a boundary, with bounded below mean curvature (\(P_t\) is the Dirichlet semigroup). As an application, Poincaré or Nash inequalities with respect to the associated measure yield isoperimetric inequalities. The two most inspiring references are Cranston for the coupling method (a refinement of a coupling by Kendall) and Ledoux for the isoperimetric application.