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 “polynomial-like” 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.