Chaotic dynamics of the heat semigroup on the Damek-Ricci spaces

We consider the rank one Riemannian symmetric spaces of noncompact type and their non-symmetric generalization, namely the Damek-Ricci spaces. We show that the heat semigroup generated by a certain perturbation of the Laplace-Beltrami operator of these spaces is chaotic on their L _p -spaces when p > 2. The range of p and the corresponding perturbation are sharp. A precursor to this result is due to Ji and Weber 19] where it was shown that under identical conditions the heat operator is subspace-chaotic on the Riemannian symmetric spaces, which is weaker than it being chaotic. We also extend the results to the Lorentz spaces L _p,q , which are generalizations of the Lebesgue spaces. This enables us to point out that the chaoticity degenerates to subspace-chaoticity only when q = ∞.