Existence of non-trivial harmonic functions on Cartan-Hadamard manifolds of unbounded curvature
by Marc Arnaudon, Anton Thalmaier and Stefanie Ulsamer

The Liouville property of a complete Riemannian manifold M (i.e., the question whether there exist non-trivial bounded harmonic functions on M) attracted a lot of attention. For Cartan-Hadamard manifolds the role of lower curvature bounds is still an open problem. We discuss examples of Cartan-Hadamard manifolds of unbounded curvature where the limiting angle of Brownian motion degenerates to a single point on the sphere at infinity, but where nevertheless the space of bounded harmonic functions is as rich as in the non-degenerate case. To see the full boundary the point at infinity has to be blown up in a non-trivial way. Such examples indicate that the situation concerning the famous conjecture of Greene and Wu about existence of non-trivial bounded harmonic functions on Cartan-Hadamard manifolds is much more complicated than one might have expected.

Math. Zeitschrift 263 (2009) 369-409

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The paper is available here:

Marc Arnaudon
arnaudon@math.univ-poitiers.fr
Anton Thalmaier
anton.thalmaier@uni.lu
Stefanie Ulsamer
stefanie.ulsamer@d-fine.de

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