Heat kernel estimates for the Grusin operator

Abstract

We study the geometry associated to the Grusin operator G=\Delta_{x}+|x|^{2}\partial_{u}^{2} on \mathbb{R}_{x}^{n}\times\mathbb{R}_{u}, to obtain heat kernel estimates for this operator. The main work is to find the shortest geodesics connecting two given points in $\mathbb{R}^{n+1}$. This gives the Carnot-Caratheodory distance d_{CC}, associated to this operator. The main result in the second part is to give Gaussian bounds for the heat kernel K_{t} in terms of the Carnot-Caratheodory distance. In particular we obtain the following estimate |k_{t}(\zeta,\eta)|\leq C t^{-\frac{n}{2}-1}\min(1+\frac{d_{CC}(\zeta,\eta)} {|x+\xi|},1+\frac{d_{CC}(\zeta,\eta)^{2}}{4t})^{\alpha}e^{-\frac{1}{4t}d_{CC} (\zeta,\eta)^{2}} for all $\zeta=(x,u_{1}), \eta=(\xi,u)\in\mathbb{R}^{n+1}$, where $\alpha = \max{\frac{n}{2}-1,0}$. Here the homogeneous dimension is q=n+2, so that $\frac{n}{2}-1=\frac{q-4}{2}$. This shows that our result for $n\geq2$ corresponds with the result on the Heisenberg group, which was given by Beals, Gaveau, Greiner in [1].