Around heat decay on forms and relations of nilpotent Lie groups

One knows that the large time heat decay exponent on a nilpotent group is given by half the growing rate of the volume of its large balls. This work deals with the similar problem of trying to interpret geometrically the heat decay on (one) forms. We will show how it is (partially) related to the depth of the relations required to define the group. The tools used apply in general on Carnot-Caratheodory manifolds.