A note on Perelman's LYH-type inequality (Q874814)

In this paper the author is interested to give an explicit proof of an inequality used by Perelman in his paper on the Ricci-flow on an \(n\)-dimensional manifold \(M\), and that is also crucial in some related questions. (See quoted references [1, 3] in the paper.) More precisely the inequality is the following: \[ v_H=\left[\tau\left(2\triangle f-| \nabla f| ^2+R\right)+f-n\right]H\leq 0,\tag{1} \] on \(M\times[0,T]\). Here, \(H=e^{-f}/(4\pi\tau)^{n/2}\), \(\tau=T-t\), is the fundamental solution to the conjugate heat equation \(u_t-\triangle u+Ru=0\), which satisfies the following boundary value problem: \[ \begin{cases} (\partial_t+\triangle_y+R(y,t))H(y,t;x,T))=0,\quad \forall (y,t),\quad t<T\cr \lim_{t\to T}\int_{M}H(y,t;x,T)f(y,t)\,d\mu_t(y)=f(x,T). \end{cases} \] The inequality (1) is of Lie-Yau type (and called also \textit{differential Harnack inequality}). More precisely, one can see that the following monotonicity property \({{d}\over{d\tau}}\int_{M}v_Hh\,d\mu_{\tau}\leq 0\) holds, for any smooth function \(h(y)\geq 0\) with compact support. Then, the Lie-Yau type inequality \(v_H\leq 0\) follows provided the claim \[ \lim_{\tau\to 0}\int_{M}v_Hh\,d\mu_{\tau}\leq 0.\tag{2} \] The main purpose of this paper is to prove (2). Furthermore, the author improves also the known differential inequalities of Li-Yau-Hamilton type via monotonicity formulae. The paper, after a first introduction, splits in to four more sections. 2. Some known results are collected and some estimates needed to proving (2) are derived. 3. Results in Section 2 are assembled and (2) proved. 4. Lie-Yau-Hamilton estimates, via monotonicity formulas, are improved. 5. Local monotonicity formulae are considered.