The Oshima–Sekiguchi and Liouville theorems on Heintze groups

Let L be an elliptic operator on a Riemannian manifold M. A function F annihilated by L is said to be L-harmonic. F is said to have moderate growth if and only if F grows at most exponentially in the Riemannian distance. If M is a rank-one symmetric space and L is the Laplace–Beltrami operator for M, the Oshima–Sekiguchi theorem [T. Oshima, J. Sekiguchi, Eigenspaces of invariant differential operators on an affine symmetric space, Invent.Math. 57 (1980) 1–81] states that a L-harmonic function F has moderate growth if and only if F is the Poisson integral of a distribution on the Furstenberg boundary. In this work we prove that this result generalizes to a very large class of homogeneous Riemannian manifolds of negative curvature. We also (i) prove a Liouville type theorem that characterizes the “polynomial-like” harmonic functions which vanish on the boundary in terms of their growth properties, (ii) describe all “polynomiallike” harmonic functions, and (iii) give asymptotic expansions for the Poisson kernel. One consequence of this work is that every Schwartz distribution on the boundary is the boundary value for a L-harmonic function F which is uniquely determined modulo “polynomial-like” harmonic functions. © 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.