Brownian Motion on Finsler Manifolds

The aim of this thesis is to extend the concept of Brownian motion on Riemannian manifolds to the more general Finsler manifolds. We give a reasonable definition of Brownian motion which is very similar to the one in the Riemannian case. However for the proof of existence we use a slightly different but equivalent approach to Brownian motion. Therefore we introduce the Finsler Laplacian in a natural way and apply the Moreau-Yosida approximation and the theory of nonpositively curved metric spaces to construct a global solution to the heat equation on Finsler manifolds. Furthermore we approximate the Finsler structure by a time-dependent Riemannian metric which is induced by a function on the manifold. Aside from that we apply the recently proven existence theorem for Brownian motion on time-dependent Riemannian manifolds.