The Sharp Lower Bound of the First Eigenvalue of the Sub-Laplacian on a Quaternionic Contact Manifold

The main technical result of the paper is a Bochner type formula for the sub-Laplacian on a quaternionic contact manifold. With the help of this formula we establish a version of Lichnerowicz’s theorem giving a lower bound of the eigenvalues of the sub-Laplacian under a lower bound on the Sp(n)Sp(1) components of the qc-Ricci curvature. It is shown that in the case of a 3-Sasakian manifold the lower bound is reached iff the quaternionic contact manifold is a round 3-Sasakian sphere. Another goal of the paper is to establish a priori estimates for square integrals of horizontal derivatives of smooth compactly supported functions. As an application, we prove a sharp inequality bounding the horizontal Hessian of a function by its sub-Laplacian on the quaternionic Heisenberg group.