Sharp growth estimates for warping functions in multiply warped product manifolds

By applying an average method in PDE, we obtain a dichotomy between "constancy" and "infinity" of the warping functions on complete noncompact Riemannian manifolds for an appropriate isometric immersion of a multiply warped product manifold $N_1\times_{f_2} N_2 \times \cdots \times _{f_k} N_k\, $ into a Riemannian manifold. Generalizing the earlier work of the authors in [{Glasg. Math. J. 51 (2009) 579-592], we establish sharp inequalities between the mean curvature of the immersion and the sectional curvatures of the ambient manifold under the influence of quantities of a purely analytic nature (the growth of the warping functions). Several applications of our growth estimates are also presented.