Subelliptic Li-Yau estimates on three dimensional model spaces

TL;DR

This paper establishes Li-Yau inequalities for heat equations on three fundamental subelliptic model spaces, introducing a parameter that mimics Ricci curvature bounds to derive key geometric and analytic estimates.

Contribution

It introduces a novel parameter  that acts as a Ricci curvature lower bound analogue in subelliptic spaces, enabling classical geometric inequalities to be proved.

Findings

Li-Yau inequalities are proved on SU(2), Heisenberg, and SL(2) models.

A parameter  is identified that bounds the heat kernel and Sobolev inequalities.

Results extend Riemannian geometric bounds to subelliptic settings.

Abstract

We describe three elementary models in three dimensional subelliptic geometry which correspond to the three models of the Riemannian geometry (spheres, Euclidean spaces and Hyperbolic spaces) which are respectively the SU(2), Heisenberg and SL(2) groups. On those models, we prove parabolic Li-Yau inequalities on positive solutions of the heat equation. We use for that the $\Gamma_{2}$ techniques that we adapt to those elementary model spaces. The important feature developed here is that although the usual notion of Ricci curvature is meaningless (or more precisely leads to bounds of the form $-\infty$ for the Ricci curvature), we describe a parameter $\rho$ which plays the same role as the lower bound on the Ricci curvature, and from which one deduces the same kind of results as one does in Riemannian geometry, like heat kernel upper bounds, Sobolev inequalities and diameter estimates.