A Convergence Result for Dirichlet Semigroups on Tubular Neighbourhoods and the Marginals of Conditional Brownian Motion

Abstract

We investigate yet another approach to understand the limit behaviour of Brownian motion conditioned to stay within a tubular neighbourhood around a closed and connected submanifold of a Riemannian manifold. In this context, we identify a second order generator subject to Dirichlet conditions on the boundary of the tube and study its associated semigroups. After a suitable rescaling and renormalization procedure, we obtain convergence of these semigroups, both in $L^2$ and in Sobolev spaces of arbitrarily large index, to a limit semigroup, as the tube diameter tends to zero. As a byproduct, we conclude that the conditional Brownian motion converges in finite dimensional distributions to a limit process supported by the path space of the submanifold.