Abstract

this paper do not directly use the Ricci curvature assumption. In fact, we will show that Theorems 1.1, 1.2 hold true for any manifold which is quasi-isometric (even roughly-isometric, under any reasonable bounded local geometry assumption) to a manifold with non-negative Ricci-curvature. In particular, the bounds of Examples 1.1, 1.2, hold true if the Laplace operator is replaced by a uniformly elliptic operator in divergence form. Thus, the bounds stated above are reasonably stable. The adequate hypothesis for our purpose is expressed in terms of a parabolic Harnack inequality or, equivalently, in terms of certain Poincar'e inequality and volume growth (see below Section 2.2). The present work originated from our desire to understand the behavior of the heat kernel on manifolds with more than one ends. Indeed, together with good estimates of certain hitting probabilities obtained in [14], the result presented here is one of the main building blocks in the proof of the sharp estimates for the heat kernel on manifolds with ends that have been announced in [11] and are proved in [12]. The following result complements Theorems 1.1, 1.2 in this direction. Given a Riemannian manifold with k ends, let U be a relatively compact open set in M with smooth boundary such that M n U has exactly k unbounded connected components E 1 ; : : : ; E k . Let K i = @U " E i , and consider E i as a manifold with boundary ffi E i := K i . Denote by p i the heat kernel on E i and by p\Omega i the Dirichlet heat kernel on\Omega i = E i n K i (in other words, p i satisfies the Neumann condition on K i , whereas p\Omega i satisfies the Dirichlet condition on K i ). Let also V i (x; t) be the volume function on E i . For each end E i , fix a point o i 2 K i and define the functions H i , D...

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