Convergence of time-inhomogeneous geodesic random walks and its application to coupling methods

Abstract

We study an approximation by time-discretized geodesic random walks of a diffusion process associated with a family of time-dependent metrics on manifolds. The condition we assume on the metrics is a natural time-inhomogeneous extension of lower Ricci curvature bounds. In particular, it includes the case of backward Ricci flow, and no further a priori curvature bound is required. As an application, we construct a coupling by reflection which yields a nice estimate of coupling time, and hence a gradient estimate for the associated semigroups.

Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AOP676 the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1007.0275