Heat kernel estimate for the Laplace-Beltrami operator under Bakry-Émery Ricci curvature condition and applications

We establish a Gaussian upper bound of the heat kernel for the Laplace-Beltrami operator on complete Riemannian manifolds with Bakry-emery Ricci curvature bounded below. As applications, we first prove an L1-Liouville property for non-negative subharmonic functions when the potential function of the Bakry-emery Ricci curvature tensor is of at most quadratic growth. Then we derive lower bounds of the eigenvalues of the Laplace -Beltrami operator on closed manifolds. An upper bound of the bottom spectrum is also obtained. (c) 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.