The vanishing of L2 harmonic one-forms on based path spaces

We prove the triviality of the first L2 cohomology class of based path spaces of Riemannian manifolds furnished with Brownian motion measure, and the consequent vanishing of L2 harmonic one-forms. We give explicit formulae for closed and co-closed one-forms expressed as differentials of functions and co-differentials of L2 two-forms, respectively; these are considered as extended Clark–Ocone formulae. A feature of the proof is the use of the temporal structure of path spaces to relate a rough exterior derivative operator on one-forms to the exterior differentiation operator used to construct the de Rham complex and the self-adjoint Laplacian on L2 one-forms. This Laplacian is shown to have a spectral gap. © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved