Heat semigroup approach to isoperimetric inequalities in metric measure spaces

Series
Stochastics Seminar
Time
Thursday, January 30, 2020 - 3:05pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Patricia Alonso-Ruiz – Texas A&M University – paruiz@math.tamu.eduhttps://www.math.tamu.edu/~paruiz/
Organizer
Christian Houdré

The classical isoperimetric problem consists in finding among all sets with the same volume (measure) the one that minimizes the surface area (perimeter measure). In the Euclidean case, balls are known to solve this problem. To formulate the isoperimetric problem, or an isoperimetric inequality, in more general settings, requires in particular a good notion of perimeter measure.

The starting point of this talk will be a characterization of sets of finite perimeter original to Ledoux that involves the heat semigroup associated to a given stochastic process in the space. This approach put in connection isoperimetric problems and functions of bounded variation (BV) via heat semigroups, and we will extend these ideas to develop a natural definition of BV functions and sets of finite perimeter on metric measure spaces. In particular, we will obtain corresponding isoperimetric inequalies in this setting.

The main assumption on the underlying space will be a non-negative curvature type condition that we call weak Bakry-Émery and is satisfied in many examples of interest, also in fractals such as (infinite) Sierpinski gaskets and carpets. The results are part of joint work with F. Baudoin, L. Chen, L. Rogers, N. Shanmugalingam and A. Teplyaev.