posted on 2006-10-17, 08:18authored byK.D. Elworthy, Xue-Mei Li
We consider versions of Malliavin calculus on path spaces of compact manifolds
with diffusion measures, defining Gross-Sobolev spaces of differentiable functions
and proving their intertwining with solution maps, I, of certain stochastic differential
equations. This is shown to shed light on fundamental uniqueness questions for this
calculus including uniqueness of the closed derivative operator d and Markov uniqueness
of the associated Dirichlet form. A continuity result for the divergence operator
by Kree and Kree is extended to this situation. The regularity of conditional expectations
of smooth functionals of classical Wiener space, given I, is considered and
shown to have strong implications for these questions. A major role is played by the
(possibly sub-Riemannian) connections induced by stochastic differential equations:
Damped Markovian connections are used for the covariant derivatives.