Equivariant discretizations of diffusions and harmonic functions of bounded growth (Q2164420)

This paper considers Lyons-Sullivan discretizations of the associated diffusions and harmonic functions of bounded growth for covering spaces and properly discontinuous actions with compatible diffusion operators. Given a non compact and connected manifold \(M\) together with an (elliptic) diffusion operator \(L\) on \(M\) that is symmetric on \(C_{c}^{\infty}(M)\) with respect to a smooth volume element on \(M\) the authors establish a one-to-one correspondence between \(L\)-harmonic functions of bounded growth on \(M\) and \(\mu\)-harmonic functions of bounded growth on a given fiber \(X \subseteq M\) of \(p\), where \(\mu\) belongs to a certain class of families \(\mu = (\mu_y)_{y\in M}\) of probability measures on X and where \(\mu\)-harmonic functions on \(X\) are the solutions of the operator \(\Delta_{\mu}\) defined by \((\Delta_{\mu}f)(y)=\sum_{x \in X} \mu_{y}(x)(f(x)-f(y))\). Let us denote by \(\mathcal{H}_{\alpha}(M,L)\) and \(\mathcal{H}_{\alpha}(X,\mu)\), the spaces of \(\alpha\)-bounded \(L\)-harmonic functions on \(M\) and \(\alpha\)-bounded \(\mu\)-harmonic functions on \(X\), respectively, where \(\alpha\) is a subsexponential growth function. The main result of the paper (Theorem A) is that, under appropriate conditions, the restriction of an \(\alpha\)-bounded \(L\)-harmonic function on \(M\) to \(X\) is \(\alpha\)-bounded and \(\mu\)-harmonic, and the restriction map \(\mathcal{H}_{\alpha}(M,L) \to\mathcal{H}_{\alpha}(X,\mu)\) is an isomorphism. The authors then provide three applications of these results in the same context under the assumption of invariance of the operator \(L\) and the volume element with respect to a group \(\Gamma\) which acts properly discontinuously and cocompactly on \(M\). For the case of \(L\)-harmonic functions of polynomial growth, that is, the growth types determined by the growth functions \((r+1)^d\), \(d \ge 1\) they provide interesting results concerning the space \(\mathcal{H}^{d}(M,L)\) of harmonic functions on \(M\) of polynomial growth of degree of at most \(d\), among which a Liouville type theorem (Theorem C) as well as finite dimensionality results (Theorems D and E).