Curvature Dimension Inequalities and Subelliptic Heat Kernel Gradient Bounds on Contact Manifolds

We study curvature dimension inequalities for the sub-Laplacian on contact Riemannian manifolds. This new curvature dimension condition is then used to obtain:

• Geometric conditions ensuring the compactness of the underlying manifold (Bonnet–Myers type results);
• Volume estimates of metric balls;
• Gradient bounds and stochastic completeness for the heat semigroup generated by the sub-Laplacian;
• Spectral gap estimates.