On the potential function of gradient steady Ricci solitons (Q1935479)

A steady gradient Ricci soliton is a Riemannian manifold \((M,g)\) together with a real potential function \(f\) satisfying \(\text{Ric}+ \text{Hess\,}f= 0\). For a complete and noncompact \(M\), it is shown that the infimum of the potential function decays linearly. In particular it cannot be bounded unless it is constant. Furthermore, no gradient steady Ricci soliton admits uniformly positive scalar curvature. A further results concerns a volume comparison for smooth metric measure spaces which is based on a \(f\)-mean curvature comparison.