arXiv research

Formula calculates manifold Euler characteristic from curvature.

The paper explores the index theory of sub-Laplacians on higher nilpotent Carnot manifolds.

Study large deviations for hypoelliptic diffusion on sub-Riemannian manifolds.

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…

Study spectral properties of sub-Laplacians in Carnot groups.

We prove a geometrically meaningful stochastic representation of the derivative of the heat semigroup on sub-Riemannian manifolds with tranverse symmetries. This representation is obtained from the study of Bochner-Weitzenbock type formulas for sub-Laplacians on 1-forms. As a consequence, we prove new hypoelliptic heat…

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 ass…

Study solves sub-Laplacian equivalence on a specific Heisenberg group.

New index formula for hypoelliptic operators on manifolds.

Study on infinite-dimensional Heisenberg groups using hypoelliptic heat kernels.

Maps commuting with sub-Laplacians on Carnot groups are conformal.

This paper discusses the existence of gradient estimates for second order hypoelliptic heat kernels on manifolds. It is now standard that such inequalities, in the elliptic case, are equivalent to a lower bound on the Ricci tensor of the Riemannian metric. For hypoelliptic operators, the associated "Ricci curvature" ta…

Study of intrinsic sub-Laplacian for hypersurfaces in contact sub-Riemannian manifolds.

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 …

We define a CR structure on a distinguished hyperplane in $\mathbb{C}^{n+1}$ and the CR sub-Laplacian on this CR manifold. We also define symmetries of the CR sub-Laplacian in general and for this special case construct all of them using the ambient construction. Then we investigate the algebra structure of the symmetr…

Extends elliptic operator regularity to maximally hypoelliptic operators.

The aim of this paper is to present the construction, out of the Kohn-Rossi complex, of a new hypoelliptic operator $Q_{L}$ on almost CR manifolds equipped with a real structure. The operator acts on all (p,q)-forms, but when restricted to (p,0)-forms and (p,n)-forms it is a sum of squares up to sign factor and lower o…

The paper compares three hypoelliptic Laplacians on a specific 5D Cartan group.

The paper proves new comparison theorems for sub-Laplacian in foliations with minimal leaves.

We present an index theorem for certain hypoelliptic differential operators on foliated manifolds. Our proof is a development of Alain Connes tangent groupoid proof of the Atiyah-Singer index theorem. The paper is largely self-contained.

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 hypo…

The starting point of our analysis is an old idea of writing an eigenfunction expansion for a heat kernel considered in the case of a hypoelliptic heat kernel on a nilpotent Lie group $G$. One of the ingredients of this approach is the generalized Fourier transform. The formula one gets using this approach is explicit …

Innovative advances validate a conjecture on maximal hypoellipticity in sub-Riemannian geometry.

We consider different sub-Laplacians on a sub-Riemannian manifold $M$. Namely, we compare different natural choices for such operators, and give conditions under which they coincide. One of these operators is a sub-Laplacian we constructed previously in \cite{GordinaLaetsch2014a}. This operator is canonical with respec…

We prove a general essential self-adjointness criterion for sub-Laplacians on complete sub-Riemannian manifolds, defined with respect to singular measures. As a consequence, we show that the intrinsic sub-Laplacian (i.e. defined w.r.t. Popp's measure) is essentially self-adjoint on the equiregular connected components …

We study eigenvalue problems for intrinsic sub-Laplacians on regular sub-Riemannian manifolds. We prove upper bounds for sub-Laplacian eigenvalues $λ_k$ of conformal sub-Riemannian metrics that are asymptotically sharp as $k\to +\infty$. For Sasakian manifolds with a lower Ricci curvature bound, and more generally, for…

We study the sub-Laplacian of the $15$-dimensional unit sphere which is obtained by lifting with respect to the Hopf fibration the Laplacian of the octonionic projective space. We obtain in particular explicit formulas for its heat kernel and deduce an expression for the Green function of a related sub-Laplacian. As a …

The main goal of this work is to study the sub-Laplacian of the unit sphere which is obtained by lifting with respect to the Hopf fibration the Laplacian of the quaternionic projective space. We obtain in particular explicit formulas for its heat kernel and deduce an expression for the Green function of the conformal s…

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 recen…

We compute the small time asymptotic of the fundamental solution of Hörmander's type hypoelliptic operators with drift, at a stationary point, $x_0$, of the drift field. We show that the order of the asymptotic depends on the controllability of an associated control problem and of its approximating system. If the contr…

In this paper we prove local analytic hypoellipticity for a degenerate sum of squares of complex vector fields generalizing those of Kohn in "Hypoellipticity and Loss of Derivatives". Kohn's article is to appear in the Annals of Mathematics with an appendix by Derridj and Tartakoff proving local analyticity in that cas…

Study hypoelliptic operators on Carnot manifolds, extending index theory results.

Sharp inequality on Siegel domain involving weighted norms and sub-Laplacian.

A linear different operator L is called weakly hypoelliptic if any local solution u of Lu=0 is smooth. We allow for systems, that is, the coefficients may be matrices, not necessarily of square size. This is a huge class of important operators which cover all elliptic, overdetermined elliptic, subelliptic and parabolic…

In this paper, we first obtain the sub-Laplacian comparison theorem in a complete noncompact pseudohermitian manifold of vanishing torsion (i.e. Sasakian manifold). Secondly, we derive the sub-gradient estimate for positive pseudoharmonic functions in a complete noncompact pseudohermitian manifold which satisfies the C…

The main technical result of the paper is a Bochner type formula for the sub-laplacian on a quaternionic contact manifold. With the help of this formula we establish a version of Lichnerowicz' theorem giving a lower bound of the eigenvalues of the sub-Laplacian under a lower bound on the $Sp(n)Sp(1)$ components of the …

In this paper we prove a short time asymptotic expansion of a hypoelliptic heat kernel on an Euclidean space and a compact manifold. We study the "cut locus" case, namely, the case where energy-minimizing paths which join the two points under consideration form not a finite set, but a compact manifold. Under mild assum…

We prove upper bounds for sub-Laplacian eigenvalues independent of a pseudo-Hermitian structure on a CR manifold. These bounds are compatible with the Menikoff-Sjoestrand asymptotic law, and can be viewed as a CR version of Korevaar's bounds for Laplace eigenvalues of conformal metrics.

We give an explicit geometric formula for the twisted orbital integrals using the method of the hypoelliptic Laplacian developed by Bismut. Combining with the twisted trace formula, we can evaluate the equivariant trace of the heat operators of the Laplacians on a compact locally symmetric space. In particular, we revi…

This paper considers a classical question of approximation of Brownian motion by a random walk in the setting of a sub-Riemannian manifold $M$. To construct such a random walk we first address several issues related to the degeneracy of such a manifold. In particular, we define a family of sub-Laplacian operators natur…

CR invariant differential operators on densities with leading part a power of the sub-Laplacian are derived. One family of such operators is constructed from the ``conformally invariant powers of the Laplacian'' via the Fefferman metric; the powers which arise for these operators are bounded in terms of the dimension. …

We prove that the first positive eigenvalue, normalized by the volume, of the sub-Laplacian associated with a strictly pseudoconvex pseudo-Hermitian structure $\θ$ on the CR sphere S 2n+1 $\subset$ C n+1 , achieves its maximum when $\θ$ is the standard contact form.

This study explores the index theory of Heisenberg elliptic and transversally Heisenberg elliptic operators using $KK$-theory.

Sub-Riemannian spectral distance defined using eigenfunctions of sub-Laplacian

We consider the heat equation associated with a class of second order hypoelliptic Hörmander operators with constant second order term and linear drift. We describe the possible small time heat kernel expansion on the diagonal giving a geometric characterization of the coefficients in terms of the divergence of the dri…

Please see the article for the abstract.

Let Y=G/L be a flag manifold for a reductive G and K a maximal compact subgroup of G. We define an equivariant differential operator on G/(L cap K) playing the role of an equivariant Dolbeault Laplacian when restricted to the complex manifold G/L, using a distribution transverse to the fibers and satisfying the Hormand…

The Atiyah-Singer index theorem is a topological formula for the index of an elliptic differential operator. The topological index depends on a cohomology class that is constructed from the principal symbol of the operator. On contact manifolds, the important Fredholm operators are not elliptic, but hypoelliptic. Their…