The asymptotic behavior of a class of nonlinear semigroups in Hadamard spaces (Q2348781)

Let \(\mathcal{H}\) be a Hadamard space, that is, a complete geodesic metric space of nonpositive curvature. Let \(F:\mathcal{H}\to\mathcal{H}\) be a nonexpansive mapping. Given \(\lambda>0\), the mapping \(x\mapsto R_\lambda x\) is called the \textit{resolvent} of \(F\) if \(R_\lambda x\) is the unique fixed point of the mapping \(G_{x,\lambda}:\mathcal{H}\to\mathcal{H}\) defined by \[ G_{x,\lambda}(y)=\frac{1}{1+\lambda}x+\frac{\lambda}{1+\lambda}Fy,\quad y\in\mathcal{H}. \] It is known that the family \((T_t)\), where \[ T_tx=\lim\limits_{n\to\infty}\left(R_{\frac{t}{n}}\right)^nx,\quad x\in\mathcal{H}, \] is a strongly continuous semigroup of nonexpansive mappings. One of the main results of this article is the following Theorem. Let \(F:\mathcal{H}\to\mathcal{H}\) be a nonexpansive mapping with at least one fixed point and let \(x_0\in\mathcal{H}\). Then \(T_tx_0\) weakly converges to a fixed point of \(F\) as \(t\to\infty\). It is also proved that the same asymptotic behavior is shared by the proximal point algorithm. The above theorem is applied to harmonic mapping theory in singular spaces and the convergence of the heat flow to a solution of a Dirichlet problem is obtained under very mild assumptions. To this end, the authors construct discrete and continuous heat flows with \(F\) being a nonlinear Markov operator.