Modified curvatures on manifolds with boundary and applications (Q462303)

Relations between curvature and heat semigroup, in the spirit of the celebrated Bakry-Emery criterion, were extensively studied on a closed Riemannian manifold. In order to extend such studies to a reflecting diffusion process and its semigroup \(P_t\), to the framework of a manifold with boundary, the author introduces new curvature operators taking the second fundamental form of the boundary into account. Relying on this, the author obtains the equivalence of some estimates relating to \(|\nabla P_t|\) with the boundedness by below of his modified Ricci curvature operator. As a consequence, under such assumption, the author derives functional inequalities relating to \(P_t\), successively of Poincaré, log-Harnack, log-Sobolev and entropic type.