Eigenvalues of collapsing domains and drift Laplacians
Journal article, 2012

By introducing a weight function to the Laplace operator, Bakry and Emery defined the "drift Laplacian" to study diffusion processes. Our first main result is that, given a Bakry-Emery manifold, there is a naturally associated family of graphs whose eigenvalues converge to the eigenvalues of the drift Laplacian as the graphs collapse to the manifold. Applications of this result include a new relationship between Dirichlet eigenvalues of domains in R-n and Neumann eigenvalues of domains in Rn+1 and a new maximum principle. Using our main result and maximum principle, we are able to generalize all the results in Riemannian geometry based on gradient estimates to Bakry-Emery manifolds.

Author

Z. Lu

Mathematical Research Letters

1073-2780 (ISSN) 1945001x (eISSN)

Vol. 19 3 627--648-

Subject Categories

Mathematics

DOI

10.4310/MRL.2012.v19.n3.a10

More information

Created

10/10/2017