We investigate the minimal and isoperimetric surface problems in a large class of sub-Riemannian manifolds, the so-called Vertically Rigid spaces. We construct an adapted connection for such spaces and, using the variational tools of Bryant, Griffiths and Grossman, derive succinct forms of the Euler-Lagrange equations for critical points for the associated variational problems. Using the Euler-Lagrange equations, we show that minimal and isoperimetric surfaces satisfy a constant horizontal mean curvature conditions away from characteristic points. Moreover, we use the formalism to construct a horizontal second fundamental form, II0, for vertically rigid spaces and, as a first application, use II0 to show that minimal surfaces cannot have points of horizontal positive curvature and that minimal surfaces in Carnot groups cannot be locally strictly horizontally geometrically convex. We note that the convexity condition is distinct from others currently in the literature.

In this paper, we establish a Bochner type formula on Alexandrov spaces with Ricci curvature bounded below. Yau’s gradient estimate for harmonic functions is also obtained on Alexandrov spaces.

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We prove the diagonal upper bound of heat kernels for regular Dirichlet forms on metric measure spaces with volume doubling condition. As hypotheses, we use the Faber-Krahn inequality, the generalized capacity condition and an upper bound for the integrated tail of the jump kernel. The proof goes though a parabolic mean value inequality for subcaloric functions.

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