Compact harmonic RCD$(K, N)$ spaces are harmonic manifolds

Abstract

In this paper, we study harmonic RCD$(K,N)$ spaces as the counterpart of harmonic Riemannian manifolds with Ricci curvature bounded from below. We prove that a compact RCD$(K,N)$ space is isometric to a smooth closed Riemannian manifold if it satisfies either of the following harmonicity conditions:(1) the heat kernel $\rho(x,y,t)$ depends only on the variable $t$ and the distance between points $x$ and $y$; (2) the volume of the intersection of two geodesic balls depends only on their radii and the distance between their centers.