Non-Gaussian Aspects of Heat Kernel Behaviour (Q4340944)

The author provides a number of results concerning the time dependence of the heat kernels for intermediate and long times under very general assumptions. One of the main results is a bound on the time derivative of heat kernels under the assumptions that some off-diagonal information about the kernels is already known. The result involves minimal hypotheses, and includes the cases of continuous time symmetric Markov chains and the fundamental solutions of the evolution equations associated with higher order self-adjoint elliptic operators. The technique involves utilizing the analytic continuation of the heat kernel to complex time. Another key result of the paper concerns the long time behaviour of the heat kernel associated with a selfadjoint second order elliptic operator on a Riemannian manifold \(M\) with no assumption of completeness or bounded geometry. It states that the order of magnitude of the long time asymptotics of the heat kernel \(K(t,x,y)\) is independent of the points \(x,y\in M\). The mentioned results are applied to the case of a complete manifold with a finite number of ends with different asymptotic dimensions, which leads to the construction of examples with different asymptotics of \(\sup_{x\in M}K(t,x,y)\), \(\inf_{x\in M}K(t,x,y)\) and \(K(t,x,y)\). The last section of the paper is devoted to an investigation of circumstances in which there exist positive functions \(\sigma(t)\) and \(a(x,y)\) such that the heat kernel satisfies \(\lim_{t\rightarrow\infty}\sigma(t)^{-1}K(t,x,y)= a(x,y)\) for all \(x,y\in M\). The author proves that this is the case for most complete, recurrent manifolds and all complete manifolds of nonnegative Ricci curvature.