Spectral gap on Riemannian path space over static and evolving manifolds

In this article, we continue the discussion of Fang–Wu (2015) to estimate the spectral gap of the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck operator on path space over a Riemannian manifold of pinched Ricci curvature. Along with explicit estimates we study the short-time asymptotics of the spectral gap. The results are then extended to the path space of Riemannian manifolds evolving under a geometric flow. Our paper is strongly motivated by Naber’s recent work (2015) on characterizing bounded Ricci curvature through stochastic analysis on path space.