The growth rate of harmonic functions

Abstract

We study the growth rate of harmonic functions in two aspects: gradient estimate and frequency. We obtain the sharp gradient estimate of positive harmonic function in geodesic ball of complete surface with nonnegative curvature. On complete Riemannian manifolds with non-negative Ricci curvature and maximal volume growth, further assume the dimension of the manifold is not less than three, we prove that quantitative strong unique continuation yields the existence of nonconstant polynomial growth harmonic functions. Also the uniform bound of frequency for linear growth harmonic functions on such manifolds is obtained, and this confirms a special case of Colding-Minicozzi conjecture on frequency.