Sub-Laplacians on Compact Lie Groups: Heat Kernels, Distance, and Zeta Determinants

Abstract

We study heat kernels, sub-Riemannian distances, and spectral zeta functions of sub-Laplacians determined by closed connected subgroups of compact Lie groups. Combining Hall's inversion formula with the affine lattice expansion of the compact group heat kernel, we derive a Cartan integral representation involving the group's exponential lattice. For two-step compact Lie pairs, the full algebraic small-time heat trace expansion is determined, up to an exponentially small remainder, by two explicit constants $C_{G,L}$ and $\beta_{G,L}$. This expansion determines all heat coefficients, the poles and residues of the reduced spectral zeta function, and its values at nonpositive integers. For the transvective symmetric subclass, we prove uniform vertical asymptotics for the Carnot-Carath\'eodory distance; the leading coefficient $\mathfrak F_{G,K}(Z)$ is the attained minimum of a finite-dimensional singular value problem. For simply connected two-step pairs, we obtain an exact decomposition of the zeta-regularized determinant into local, lattice, and spectral terms, with exponential truncation estimates. We specialize these results to block subgroups of $\mathrm{SU}(N)$, recovering the classical $\mathrm{SU}(2)$ and CR sphere spectra.