Paper detail

Uniform Gaussian bounds for subelliptic heat kernels and an application to the total variation flow of graphs over Carnot groups

In this paper we study heat kernels associated to a Carnot group $G$, endowed with a family of collapsing left-invariant Riemannian metrics $σ_\e$ which converge in the Gromov-Hausdorff sense to a sub-Riemannian structure on $G$ as $\e\to 0$. The main new contribution are Gaussian-type bounds on the heat kernel for the $σ_\e$ metrics which are stable as $\e\to 0$ and extend the previous time-independent estimates in \cite{CiMa-F}. As an application we study well posedness of the total variation flow of graph surfaces over a bounded domain in $(G,\s_\e)$. We establish interior and boundary gradient estimates, and develop a Schauder theory which are stable as $\e\to 0$. As a consequence we obtain long time existence of smooth solutions of the sub-Riemannian flow ($\e=0$), which in turn yield sub-Riemannian minimal surfaces as $t\to \infty$.