The squared distance curvature is a kind of two-point curvature the sign of which turned out crucial for the smoothness of optimal transportation maps on Riemannian manifolds. Positivity properties of that new curvature have been established recently for all the simply connected compact rank one symmetric spaces, except the Cayley plane. Direct proofs were given for the sphere, an indirect one via the Hopf fibrations) for the complex and quaternionic projective spaces. Here, we present a direct proof of a property implying all the preceding ones, valid on every positively curved Riemannian locally symmetric space.

In this paper, we consider the set $\mathcal{S} = a(e^X K e^Y)$ where $a(g)$ is the abelian part in the Cartan decomposition of $g$. This is exactly the support of the measure intervening in the product formula for the spherical functions on symmetric spaces of noncompact type. We give a simple description of that support in the case of $\SL(3,\mathbf{F})$ where $\mathbf{F} = \mathbf{R}$, $\mathbf{C}$ or $\mathbf{H}$. In particular, we show that $\mathcal{S}$ is convex. We also give an application of our result to the description of singular values of a product of two arbitrary matrices with prescribed singular values.

On d\'emontre un th\'eor\`eme de Vorono\"\i\ (caract\'erisation des maxima locaux de l'invariant d'Hermite) pour les familles de r\'eseaux param\'etr\'ees par les espaces sym\'etriques irr\'e\-ductibles non exceptionnels de type non compact. We prove a theorem of Vorono\"\i\ type (characterisation of local maxima of the Hermite invariant) for the lattices parametrized by irreducible nonexceptional symmetric spaces of noncompact type.

In \cite{Anker}, Jean-Philippe Anker conjectures an upper bound for the heat kernel of a symmetric space of noncompact type. We show in this paper that his prediction is verified for the space of positive definite $n\times n$ real matrices.