An improvement on eigenfunction restriction estimates for compact boundaryless Riemannian manifolds with nonpositive sectional curvature

Abstract:

Let $(M,g)$ be an $n$-dimensional compact boundaryless Riemannian manifold with nonpositive sectional curvature. Then our conclusion is that we can give improved estimates for the $L^p$ norms of the restrictions of eigenfunctions of the Laplace-Beltrami operator to smooth submanifolds of dimension $k$, for $p>\dfrac {2n}{n-1}$ when $k=n-1$ and $p>2$ when $k\leq n-2$, compared to the general results of Burq, Gérard and Tzvetkov. Earlier, Bérard gave the same improvement for the case when $p=\infty$, for compact Riemannian manifolds without conjugate points for $n=2$, or with nonpositive sectional curvature for $n\geq 3$ and $k=n-1$. In this paper, we give the improved estimates for $n=2$, the $L^p$ norms of the restrictions of eigenfunctions to geodesics. Our proof uses the fact that the exponential map from any point in $x\in M$ is a universal covering map from $\mathbb {R}^2\backsimeq T_{x}M$ to $M$, which allows us to lift the calculations up to the universal cover $(\mathbb {R}^2,\tilde {g})$, where $\tilde {g}$ is the pullback of $g$ via the exponential map. Then we prove the main estimates by using the Hadamard parametrix for the wave equation on $(\mathbb {R}^2,\tilde {g})$, the stationary phase estimates, and the fact that the principal coefficient of the Hadamard parametrix is bounded, by observations of Sogge and Zelditch. The improved estimates also work for $n\geq 3$, with $p>\frac {4k}{n-1}$. We can then get the full result by interpolation.