Chernoff's theorem for backward propagators and applications to diffusions on manifolds

The classical Chernoff's theorem is a statement about discrete-time approximations of semigroups, where the approximations are consturcted as products of time-dependent contraction operators strongly differentiable at zero. We generalize the version of Chernoff's theorem for semigroups proved in a paper by Smolyanov et al., and obtain a theorem about descrete-time approximations of backward propagators.