Fold maps associated to geodesic random walks on non-positively curved manifolds

Abstract

We study a family of mappings from the powers of the unit tangent sphere at a point to a complete Riemannian manifold with non-positive sectional curvature, whose behavior is related to the spherical mean operator and the geodesic random walks on the manifold. We show that for odd powers of the unit tangent sphere the mappings are fold maps. Some consequences on the regularity of the transition density of geodesic random walks, and on the eigenfunctions of the spherical mean operator are discussed and related to previous work.