Uniform bounds for Neumann heat kernels and their traces in convex sets

Abstract

We prove a bound on the heat trace of the Neumann Laplacian on a convex domain that captures the first two terms in its small-time expansion, but is valid for all times and depends on the underlying domain only through very simple geometric characteristics. This is proved via a precise and uniform expansion of the on-diagonal heat kernel close to the boundary. Most of our results are valid without the convexity assumption and we also consider two-term asymptotics for the heat trace for Lipschitz domains.