Heat content and horizontal mean curvature on the Heisenberg group

Abstract

We identify the short time asymptotics of the sub-Riemannian heat content for a smoothly bounded domain in the first Heisenberg group. Our asymptotic formula generalizes prior work by van den Berg-Le Gall and van den Berg-Gilkey to the sub-Riemannian context, and identifies the first few coefficients in the sub-Riemannian heat content in terms of the horizontal perimeter and the total horizontal mean curvature of the boundary. The proof is probabilistic, and relies on a characterization of the heat content in terms of Brownian motion.