Heat kernel estimates and the essential spectrum on weighted manifolds (Q2256845)

It is a fundamental problem in geometric analysis to obtain bounds, in particular, upper bounds on the heat kernel of Riemannian manifolds. Among many applications, such bounds can be used to study the essential spectrum of the Laplacian of the Riemannian manifold. In this paper, the authors study upper bounds on the heat kernel of the drifting Laplacian of a complete nonimpact smooth Riemannian manifold with a weighted measure under the assumption that the \(q\)-Bakry-Emery Ricci tensor is bounded below. They do this by reducing to upper bounds of the heat kernels of the Laplacians on a family of related warped product spaces. They also describe the essential spectrum of the drifting Laplacian on such weighted manifolds when the \(q\)-Bakry-Emery Ricci tensor is asymptotically nonnegative.