Curvature and Other Local Inequalities in Markov Semigroups

Inspired by the approach of Ivanisvili and Volberg towards functional inequalities for probability measures with strictly convex potentials, we investigate the relationship between curvature bounds in the sense of Bakry-Emery and local functional inequalities. We will show that not only is the earlier approach for strictly convex potentials extendable to Markov semigroups and simplified through use of the Γ-calculus, providing a consolidating machinery for obtaining functional inequalities new and old in this general setting, but that a converse also holds. Local inequalities obtained are proven equivalent to Bakry-Emery curvature. Moreover we will develop this technique for metric measure spaces satisfying the RCD condition, providing a unified approach to functional and isoperimetric inequalities in non-smooth spaces with a synthetic Ricci curvature bound. Finally, we are interested in commutation properties for semi-group operators on ℝ^n in the absence of positive curvature, based on a local eigenvalue criteria.