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A universal heat semigroup characterisation of Sobolev and BV spaces in Carnot groups

In sub-Riemannian geometry there exist, in general, no known explicit representations of the heat kernels, and these functions fail to have any symmetry whatsoever. In particular, they are not a function of the control distance, nor they are for instance spherically symmetric in any of the layers of the Lie algebra. Despite these unfavourable aspects, in this paper we establish a new heat semigroup characterisation of the Sobolev and $BV$ spaces in a Carnot group by means of an integral decoupling property of the heat kernel.