Short-time asymptotics of heat kernels of hypoelliptic Laplacians on unimodular Lie groups

We consider the problem of computing heat kernel small-time asymptotics for hypoelliptic Laplacians associated to left-invariant sub-Riemannian structures on unimodular Lie groups of type I. We use the non-commutative Fourier transform of the Lie group together with perturbation theory for semigroups of operators in deriving these asymptotics.We illustrate our approach on the example of the Heisenberg group, and, as an application, we compute the short-time behaviour of the hypoelliptic heat kernel on the step 3 nilpotent Cartan and Engel groups, for which no closed-form expression for the hypoelliptic heat kernel is yet known. © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.