Nonnegative Bakry--\'Emery Curvature on Bounded-Degree Graphs Implies Volume Doubling and Poincar\'e Inequalities

We prove that every connected simple graph of bounded degree satisfying the classical dimension-free Bakry--Émery condition $\mathrm{CD}(0,\infty)$ for the unnormalised Laplacian is volume doubling and supports, at all integer graph scales, a scale-invariant $L^2$-Poincaré inequality with dilation two, with constants depending only on the maximum degree.

This settles the polynomial-growth conjecture of Cushing, Liu, and Peyerimhoff in a stronger form.

The main novelty is a dimension-free adaptation of the graph-theoretic modified nonlinear heat-flow method introduced by Münch and extended to infinite weighted graphs by Pajot and Russ: point-mass consequences of $\Gamma_2\geq0$ and positive-resolvent smoothing replace any global $\mathrm{CD}(0,n)$ reduction, while diffusive exit-time control and finite-volume localisation yield the Poincaré inequality.