On a conjecture of Laugesen and Morpurgo

A well known conjecture of R. Laugesen and C. Morpurgo asserts that the diagonal element of the Neumann heat kernel of the unit ball in $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ ($n\geq1$) is a radially increasing function. In this paper, we use probabilistic arguments to settle this conjecture, and, as an application, we derive a new proof of the Hot Spots conjecture of J. Rauch in the case of the unit disk.