Sobolev's inequality under a curvature-dimension condition (Q6173848)

For a smooth, connected Riemannian manifold \(M\) of dimension \(n \geq 3\) and Ricci curvature uniformly bounded below by \(\rho > 0\), the Sobolev inequality \[ \frac{1}{q-2} \left( \|v\|_{L^q(M)}^2 - \|v\|_{L^2(M)}^2 \right) \leq \frac{1}{n} \frac{n-1}{\rho} \|\nabla v\|_{L^2(M)}^2 \] holds with exponent \(q = \frac{2n}{n-2}\). In this article, the authors give a new and very short proof of this inequality. Their proof exploits the Bochner-Lichnerowicz-Weitzenböck formula using computations inspired by [\textit{J. Dolbeault} et al., Invent. Math. 206, No. 2, 397--440 (2016; Zbl 1379.49021)]. Assuming that for some \(W \in C^2(M)\) the operator \(L = \Delta - \nabla W \cdot \nabla\) satisfies the \(CD(\rho,n)\) curvature-dimension condition, a Sobolev inequality and a rigidity result for a related PDE are deduced using minor variants of the above computations. An additional section is devoted to elucidating the intuition behind the key computations.