The Bakry-Emery Ricci tensor and its applications to some compactness theorems (Q444160)

The Myers compactness theorem gave an upper bound of the diameter of a complete Riemannian manifold in term of a lower bound on its Ricci curvature. In particular, it implies that such manifolds are closed. Later, Wei and Wylie showed that a lower bound on the Bakry-Emery Ricci curvature associated to a bounded smooth function already implies an upper bound on the diameter of the complete manifold. In this article, the author gives two theorems in this setting. First he gives another upper bound on the diameter. This bound is sharper than the one given by Wei and Wylie if the supremum norm of the function in the Bakry-Emery tensor is bigger than a constant only depending on the dimension of the manifold. In the second theorem, the author replaces the condition on the supremum norm on the function in the Bakry-Emery tensor by the condition that its derivative decays like the distance to a fixed point. Under this assumption an upper bound of the diameter of the manifold is again obtained .