Heat kernels, smoothness estimates, and exponential decay (Q485128)

Proving decay of the heat kernel of Laplacians is quite desirable and useful. Especially so in the case of unbounded CR manifolds like the Heisenberg group and the corresponding Kohn Laplacian. Just as the usual heat kernel (in \(\mathbb{R}^n\)) decays like a Gaussian, in this paper it is proven that the heat kernel of the Kohn Laplacian on the so-called polynomial models in \(\mathbb{C}^2\) satisfies a Gaussian-like decay. This is done by introducing ``quantitative smoothness estimates'', which, roughly speaking, study the Fourier transform of functions like \(e^{-a| x| ^{1/\beta}}\) where \(\beta \geq 1\). The paper is quite well written with a very clear overview of both the results and the strategy of the proofs.