On the first eigenvalue of the Witten-Laplacian and the diameter of compact shrinking Ricci solitons

Abstract

We prove a lower bound estimate for the first non-zero eigenvalue of the Witten-Laplacian on compact Riemannian manifolds. As an application, we derive a lower bound estimate for the diameter of compact gradient shrinking Ricci solitons. Our results improve some previous estimates which were obtained by the first author and Y. Sano in [12], and by B. Andrews and L. Ni in [1]. Moreover, we extend the diameter estimate to compact self-similar shrinkers of mean curvature flow.