On the Bakry-Émery condition, the gradient estimates and the local-to-global property of \(\mathrm{RCD}^*(K,N)\) metric measure spaces (Q254233)

The authors prove higher summability and regularity of \(\Gamma(f)\) for functions in spaces satisfying the Bakry-Émery condition \(\mathrm{BE}(K,\infty)\). Here, \(\Gamma\) is the Carré du Champ representing the energy density of a strongly local Dirichlet form \(\mathcal{E}(f,g)=\int_X\Gamma(f,g)d\mathfrak{m}\) with \(f,g\in D(\mathcal{E})\subset L^2(X,\mathfrak{m})\). The condition \(\mathrm{BE}(K,N)\) is formally expressed in differential terms by \(\Gamma_2(f)\geq K\Gamma(f)+{{1}\over{N}} (\Delta f)^2\), where \(\Gamma_2(f) = {{1}\over{2}}\Delta \Gamma(f) - \Gamma (f,\Delta F)\) and \(\Delta \) is the associated self-adjoint linear operator in the Lebesgue space \(L^2(X,\mathfrak{m})\). In the Section 2 of the paper, the authors work in the general framework of Dirichlet spaces, without assuming that the Dirichlet form \(\mathcal{E}\) is induced by the Cheeger energy, and avoiding the reference to a metric structure. Under the \(\mathrm{BE}(K,\infty)\) condition, the authors establish higher integrability properties for \(\Gamma(f)\) and an extra regularity property. These properties are used to prove the local-to-global property. The authors also provide equivalent formulations and implications of the \(\mathrm{BE}(K,N)\) property that play a role in some of their papers. In the second part of the paper, the authors work with metric measure spaces and use the previous estimates to prove the local-to-global property. They discuss basic localization properties of the gradient and of Laplacians and show how the curvature lower bounds can be used to obtain the existence of cutoff functions with bounded Laplacian. At the end, the authors recall the precise definition of \(\mathrm{RCD}^*(K,N)\) spaces, the equivalence results with \(\mathrm{BE}(K,N)\) and describe the proof of the local-to-global property in the case where the space \((X,d,\mathfrak{m})\) is locally compact.