Curvature-dimension estimates for the Laplace-Beltrami operator of a totally geodesic foliation (Q494197)

The authors consider a Riemannian manifold \((M, g)\) equipped with a foliation \(\mathcal{F}\) which satisfies rather strong conditions: at the same time, it is Riemannian and the leaves are totally geodesic. Decomposing the tangent bundle \(TM\) into the orthogonal sum \(\mathcal{H}\oplus\mathcal{V}\), \(\mathcal{V}\) being the bundle tangent to \(\mathcal{F}\), they deform \(g\) conformally in the \(\mathcal{V}\)-direction by a positive constant factor \(1/ \epsilon\) and get a new Riemannian tensor \(g_\epsilon\) which provides the corresponding Laplace-Beltrami operator \(\Delta_\epsilon\) and its heat diffusion operators \(P^\epsilon_t\), \(t\geq 0\). They obtain a number of estimates (gradient bounds, log-Sobolev inequalities, Poincaré inequalities, entropy bounds) for these (\(\Delta_\epsilon\) and \(P^\epsilon_t\)) operators.