Almut Burchard, University of Toronto
On spatial monotonicity of heat kernels
The heat kernel on a manifold contains a wealth of global geometric information about the underlying space. It is of central importance for partial differential equations (describing diffusion of a unit of heat released from a point through the space) and for probability (giving the transition densities for Brownian motion).
On flat n-dimensional space, the heat kernel K_t(x,y) decreases with the distance between the points x and y (that is, temperature decreases as we move away from the heat source); the same is true on the sphere. Does the heat kernel on different Riemannian manifolds have similar properties? In general, the answer is "No!" ... except sometimes ...
MC 5501
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