We present an invariant definition of the hypoelliptic Laplacian on sub-Riemannian structures with constant growth vector, using the Popp's volume form introduced by Montgomery. This definition generalizes the one of the Laplace-Beltrami operator in Riemannian geometry. In the case of left-invariant problems on unimodular Lie groups we prove that it coincides with the usual sum of squares.
We then extend a method (first used by Hulanicki on the Heisenberg group) to compute explicitly the kernel of the hypoelliptic heat equation on any unimodular Lie group of type I. The main tool is the noncommutative Fourier transform. We then study some relevant cases: SU(2), SO(3), SL(2) (with the metrics inherited by the Killing form), and the group SE(2) of rototranslations of the plane.
Our study is motivated by some recent results about the cut and conjugate loci on these sub-Riemannian manifolds. The perspective is to understand how singularities of the sub-Riemannian distance reflect on the kernel of the corresponding hypoelliptic heat equation.
Boundary conditions for Bismut's hypoelliptic Laplacian which naturally correspond to Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions for Hodge Laplacians are considered. Those are related with specific boundary conditions for the differential and its various adjoints. Once the closed realizations of those operators are well understood, the commutation of the differential with the resolvent of the hypoelliptic Laplacian is checked with other properties like the PT-symmetry, which are important for the spectral analysis.
We study in this paper the global hypoellipticity property in the Gevrey category for the generalized twisted Laplacian on forms. Different from the 0-form case, where the twisted Laplacian is a scalar operator, this is a system of differential operators when acting on forms, each component operator being elliptic locally and degenerate globally. We obtain here the global hypoellipticity in anisotropic Gevrey space.
In this paper we study left-invariant Laplacians on compact connected groups that are form-comparable perturbations of bi-invariant Laplacians. Our results show that Gaussian bounds for derivatives of heat kernels enjoyed by certain bi-invariant Laplacians hold for their form-comparable perturbations. We further show that the parabolic operators associated with such left-invariant Laplacians, in particular, with the bi-invariant Laplacians, are hypoelliptic in various senses.
These notes are the basis of a course given at the Institut Henri Poincare in September 2014. We survey some recent results related to the geometric analysis of hypoelliptic diffusion operators on totally geodesic Riemannian foliations. We also give new applications to the study of hypocoercive estimates for Kolmogorov type operators.
The purpose of this paper is to give a new proof of results of Moscovici and Stanton on the orbital integrals associated with eta invariants on compact locally symmetric spaces. Moscovici and Stanton used methods of harmonic analysis on reductive groups. Here, we combine our approach to orbital integrals using the hypoelliptic Laplacian, with the introduction of a rotation on certain Clifford algebras. Probabilistic methods play an important role in establishing key estimates. In particular, we construct the proper It{ô} calculus associated with certain hypoelliptic diffusions.
We study the semigroup generated by the hypoelliptic Laplacian on the circle and the maximal bounded holomorphic extension of this semigroup. Using an orthogonal decomposition into harmonic oscillators with complex shifts, we describe the domain of this extension and we show that boundedness in a half-plane corresponds to absolute convergence of the expansion of the semigroup in eigenfunctions. This relies on a novel integral formula for the spectral projections which also gives asymptotics for Laguerre polynomials in a large-parameter regime.
About 15 years ago, Bismut gave a natural construction of a Hodge theory for a hypoelliptic Laplacian acting on the total space of the cotangent bundle of a Riemannian manifold. This operator interpolates between the classical elliptic Laplacian on the base and the generator of the geodesic flow. We will describe recent developments of the theory of hypoelliptic Laplacians, in particular the explicit formula obtained by Bismut for orbital integrals and the recent solution by Shen of Fried's conjecture (dating back to 1986) for locally symmetric spaces. The conjecture predicts the equality of t…
In this paper we present a comparison principle for higher order nonlinear hypoelliptic heat operators on graded Lie groups. Moreover, using the comparison principle we obtain blow-up type results and global in $t$-boundedness of solutions of nonlinear equations for the heat $p$-sub-Laplacian on stratified Lie groups. In particular, this paper generalises and extends previous results obtained by the first author and Suragan in [RS18].
In this paper we derive a variety of functional inequalities for general homogeneous invariant hypoelliptic differential operators on nilpotent Lie groups. The obtained inequalities include Hardy, Rellich, Hardy-Littllewood-Sobolev, Galiardo-Nirenberg, Caffarelli-Kohn-Nirenberg and Trudinger-Moser inequalities. Some of these estimates have been known in the case of the sub-Laplacians, however, for more general hypoelliptic operators almost all of them appear to be new as no approaches for obtaining such estimates have been available. Moreover, we obtain several versions of local and global wei…
This paper is part of a series papers devoted to geometric and spectral theoretic applications of the hypoelliptic calculus on Heisenberg manifolds. More specifically, in this paper we make use of the Heisenberg calculus of Beals-Greiner and Taylor to analyze the spectral theory of hypoelliptic operators on Heisenberg manifolds. The main results of this paper include: (i) Obtaining complex powers of hypoelliptic operators as holomorphic families of Psi_{H}DO's, which can be used to define a scale of weighted Sobolev spaces interpolating the weighted Sobolev spaces of Folland-Stein and providin…
The overall goal of this dissertation is to investigate certain classical results from harmonic analysis, replacing the Euclidean setting, the abelian structure and the elliptic Laplace operator with a non-commutative environment and hypoelliptic operators. More specifically, we consider wave equations for hypoelliptic homogeneous left-invariant operators on graded Lie groups with time-dependent non-negative propagation speeds that are Hölder-regular or even more so. The corresponding Euclidean problem has been extensively studied in the `80s and some additional results have been recently obta…
In this paper we study the Cauchy problem for the wave equations for hypoelliptic homogeneous left-invariant operators on graded Lie groups when the time-dependent non-negative propagation speed is regular, Hölder, and distributional. For Hölder coefficients we derive the well-posedness in the spaces of ultradistributions associated to Rockland operators on graded groups. In the case when the propagation speed is a distribution, we employ the notion of "very weak solutions" to the Cauchy problem, that was already successfully used in similar contexts in [GR15] and [RT17b]. We show that the Cau…
We establish small-time asymptotic expansions for heat kernels of hypoelliptic Hörmander operators in a neighborhood of the diagonal, generalizing former results obtained in particular by Métivier and by Ben Arous. The coefficients of our expansions are identified in terms of the nilpotentization of the underlying sub-Riemannian structure. Our approach is purely analytic and relies in particular on local and global subelliptic estimates as well as on the local nature of small-time asymptotics of heat kernels. The fact that our expansions are valid not only along the diagonal but in an asymptot…
We consider sub-Laplacians in open bounded sets in a homogeneous Carnot group and study their spectral properties. We prove that these operators have a pure point spectrum, and prove the existence of the spectral gap. In addition, we give applications to the small ball problem for a hypoelliptic Brownian motion and the large time behavior of the heat content in a regular domain.
We propose analogues of Green's and Picone's identities for the $p$-sub-Laplacian on stratified Lie groups. In particular, these imply a generalised Díaz-Saá inequality for the $p$-sub-Laplacian on stratified Lie groups. Using these we derive a comparison principle and uniqueness of a positive solution to nonlinear hypoelliptic equations on general stratified Lie groups extending to the setting of the general stratified Lie groups previously known results on Euclidean and Heisenberg groups.
In this paper we consider the Witten Laplacian on 0-forms and give sufficient conditions under which the Witten Laplacian admits a compact resolvent. These conditions are imposed on the potential itself, involving the control of high order derivatives by lower ones, as well as the control of the positive eigenvalues of the Hessian matrix. This compactness criterion for resolvent is inspired by the one for the Fokker-Planck operator. Our method relies on the nilpotent group techniques developed by Helffer-Nourrigat [Hypoellipticité maximale pour des opérateurs polynômes de champs de vecteurs, 1…
Inspired by results of A. Bergamasco on perturbations of vector fields defined on the two-dimensional torus, and of J. Delgado and M. Ruzhansky on properties of invariant operators with respect to an elliptic operator defined on a closed manifold, we give necessary and sufficient conditions to ensure that perturbations of a globally hypoelliptic operator defined on $\T\times M$, continue to be globally hypoelliptic, where $\T$ is the flat torus and $M$ is a closed smooth manifold. For this, we analyze the behavior, at infinity, of the sequences of eigenvalues generated by the family of matrice…
In this paper we prove a sub-Riemannian version of the classical Santaló formula: a result in integral geometry that describes the intrinsic Liouville measure on the unit cotangent bundle in terms of the geodesic flow. Our construction works under quite general assumptions, satisfied by any sub-Riemannian structure associated with a Riemannian foliation with totally geodesic leaves (e.g. CR and QC manifolds with symmetries), any Carnot group, and some non-equiregular structures such as the Martinet one. A key ingredient is a "reduction procedure" that allows to consider only a simple subset of…
This paper is a proceedings version of \cite{CHT-I}, in which we state a Quantum Ergodicity (QE) theorem on a 3D contact manifold, and in which we establish some properties of the Quantum Limits (QL). We consider a sub-Riemannian (sR) metric on a compact 3D manifold with an oriented contact distribution. There exists a privileged choice of the contact form, with an associated Reeb vector field and a canonical volume form that coincides with the Popp measure. We state a QE theorem for the eigenfunctions of any associated sR Laplacian, under the assumption that the Reeb flow is ergodic. The limi…
In this note we focus our attention on a stochastic heat equation defined on the Heisenberg group $\mathbf{H}^{n}$ of order $n$. This equation is written as $\partial_t u=\frac{1}{2}Δu+u\dot{W}_α$, where $Δ$ is the hypoelliptic Laplacian on $\mathbf{H}^{n}$ and $\{\dot{W}_α; α>0\}$ is a family of Gaussian space-time noises which are white in time and have a covariance structure generated by $(-Δ)^{-α}$ in space. Our aim is threefold: (i) Give a proper description of the noise $W_α$; (ii) Prove that one can solve the stochastic heat equation in the Itô sense as soon as $α>\frac{n}{2}$; (iii) Gi…
In this paper we develop a theory of Besov and Triebel--Lizorkin spaces on general noncompact Lie groups endowed with a sub-Riemannian structure. Such spaces are defined by means of hypoelliptic sub-Laplacians with drift, and endowed with a measure whose density with respect to a right Haar measure is a continuous positive character of the group. We prove several equivalent characterizations of their norms, we establish comparison results also involving Sobolev spaces of recent introduction, and investigate their complex interpolation and algebra properties.
In this paper we consider the wave equations for hypoelliptic homogeneous left-invariant operators on graded Lie groups with time-dependent Hölder propagation speeds. The examples are the time-dependent wave equation for the sub-Laplacian on the Heisenberg group or on general stratified Lie groups, or $p$-evolution equations for higher order operators, already in all these cases our results being new. We establish sharp well-posedness results in the spirit of the classical result by Colombini, de Giorgi and Spagnolo. In particular, we describe an interesting loss of regularity phenomenon depen…
In this paper we study the Cauchy problem for the wave equations for sums of squares of left invariant vector fields on compact Lie groups and also for hypoelliptic homogeneous left-invariant differential operators on graded Lie groups (the positive Rockland operators), when the time-dependent propagation speed satisfies a Log-Lipschitz condition. We prove the well-posedness in the associated Sobolev spaces exhibiting a finite loss of regularity with respect to the initial data, which is not true when the propagation speed is a ${\rm H\ddot{o}lder}$ function. We also indicate an extension to g…
In this paper we study the global well-posedness of the following Cauchy problem on a sub-Riemannian manifold $M$: \begin{equation*} \begin{cases} u_{t}-\mathfrak{L}_{M} u=f(u), \;x\in M, \;t>0, \\u(0,x)=u_{0}(x), \;x\in M, \end{cases} \end{equation*} for $u_{0}\geq 0$, where $\mathfrak{L}_{M}$ is a sub-Laplacian of $M$. In the case when $M$ is a connected unimodular Lie group $\mathbb G$, which has polynomial volume growth, we obtain a critical Fujita exponent, namely, we prove that all solutions of the Cauchy problem with $u_{0}\not\equiv 0$, blow up in finite time if and only if $1<p\leq p_…
