Heat equation and compactifications of complete Riemannian manifolds (Q797846)

Let M be a complete Riemannian manifold with Ricci curvature bounded from below. Let \(\bar M\) be a compactification of M (so that M is a dense subset of M). Let \(M_{\infty}=\bar M\backslash M\). This has the ball convergence criterion if for all sequences \(x_ n\to\bar x\in M_{\infty}\) and all \(\epsilon >0\), the balls \(B(x_ n,\epsilon)\to\bar x\) as well. Let \(f\in C(\bar M)\), one tries to solve for f(x,t)\(\in C(\bar M\times (0,\infty))\) the three conditions: \((d/dt-\Delta)f=0\), \(f(x,0)=f(x)\), f(\=x,t)\(=f(\bar x)\) for \(\bar x\in M_{\infty}\). In other words, one is looking for functions which are independent of time at infinity. In this paper, the authors prove that this overdetermined parabolic problem is solvable for all f if and only if \(\bar M\) satisfies the ball convergence criterion. (If \(\bar M\) is the one point compactification, then \(\bar M\) satisfies this criterion so the heat semi-group preserves the bounded continuous functions vanishing at infinity).