The effect of curvature on convexity properties of harmonic functions and eigenfunctions

We give a proof of the Donnelly-Fefferman growth bound of Laplace-Beltrami eigenfunctions which is probably the easiest and the most elementary one. Our proof also gives new quantitative geometric estimates in terms of curvature bounds which improve and simplify previous work by Garofalo and Lin. The proof is based on a convexity property of harmonic functions on curved manifolds, generalizing Agmon’s Theorem on a convexity property of harmonic functions in R^n.