Refined and Microlocal Kakeya-Nikodym Bounds of Eigenfunctions in Higher Dimensions

Abstract

We prove a Kakeya-Nikodym bound on eigenfunctions and quasimodes, which sharpens a result of the authors and extends it to higher dimensions. As in the prior work, the key intermediate step is to prove a microlocal version of these estimates, which involves a phase space decomposition of these modes which is essentially invariant under the bicharacteristic/geodesic flow. In a companion paper, it will be seen that these sharpened estimates yield improved $L^q(M)$ bounds on eigenfunctions in the presence of nonpositive curvature when $2 < q < \frac{2(d+1)}{d-1}$.