An Observation on the Dirichlet problem at infinity in Riemannian cones

Abstract

In this short paper we show a sufficient condition for the solvability of the Dirichlet problem at infinity in Riemannian cones (as defined below).This condition is related to a celebrated result of Milnor that classifies parabolic surfaces. When applied tosmooth Riemannian manifolds with a special type of metrics (which generalise rotational symmetry) we obtain generalisations of classical criteria for the solvability of the Dirichlet problem at infinity. Our proof is short and elementary: it uses separation of variables and comparison arguments for ODE's.