The heat kernel weighted Hodge Laplacian on noncompact manifolds

On a compact orientable Riemannian manifold, the Hodge Laplacian has compact resolvent, therefore a spectral gap, and the dimension of the space of harmonic -forms is a topological invariant. By contrast, on complete noncompact Riemannian manifolds, is known to have various pathologies, among them the absence of a spectral gap and either ``too large' or ``too small' a space . In this article we use a heat kernel measure to determine the space of square-integrable forms and to construct the appropriate Laplacian . We recover in the noncompact case certain results of Hodge's theory of in the compact case. If the Ricci curvature of a noncompact connected Riemannian manifold is bounded below, then this ``heat kernel weighted Laplacian' acts on functions on in precisely the manner we would wish, that is, it has a spectral gap and a one-dimensional kernel. We prove that the kernel of on -forms is zero-dimensional on , as we expect from topology, if the Ricci curvature is nonnegative. On Euclidean space, there is a complete Hodge theory for . Weighted Laplacians also have a duality analogous to Poincaré duality on noncompact manifolds. Finally, we show that heat kernel-like measures give desirable spectral properties (compact resolvent) in certain general cases. In particular, we use measures with Gaussian decay to justify the statement that every topologically tame manifold has a strong Hodge decomposition.