Intrinsic metrics for non-local symmetric Dirichlet forms and applications to spectral theory (Q2253268)

For strongly local Dirichlet forms, the intrinsic metric plays an important role in many aspects, such as in studying decay of heat kernels, the investigation of Harnack inequalities, and to get `good' cut-off functions in the study of spectral properties. The aim of the paper under review is to extend the concept of the intrinsic metric from strongly local Dirichlet forms to the general case and to study some of its basic features. The following is the outline of the paper. \S 2. ``Preliminaries on Dirichlet forms''. This section is decomposed into four subsections: Dirichlet forms; Capacity; Algebraic structure; Beurling-Deny formula. \S 3. ``Energy measure and the space \(\mathcal{D}^{*}_{\mathrm{loc}}\)''. This section contains two subsections: The local form domain \(\mathcal{D}^{*}_{\mathrm{loc}}\); The Leibniz rule. \S 4. ``Intrinsic metrics''. In this section, the authors give the concept of the intrinsic metric for general regular Dirichlet forms and present some properties. In particular, a Rademacher theorem is given. \S 5. ``Intrinsic metrics and sets of intrinsic-metric functions''. In this section, it is shown that specifying an intrinsic metric is essentially equivalent to specifying a suitable set of (Lipschitz) continuous functions. \S 6. ``The local case''. In this section, the authors show that for local Dirichlet forms (under an additional continuity assumption), there is a maximal intrinsic metric, and it is not true in general for non-local Dirichlet forms. \S7. ``Forms without strongly local part and with absolutely continuous jump measure''. This section considers the situation that the Dirichlet form does not have a strongly local part and gives a simple sufficient condition for a pseudo-metric to be intrinsic in this case. \S8. ``Dirichlet forms with finite jump size''. In this section, the jump size of a Dirichlet form with respect to a given intrinsic metric is introduced and it is shown that there is not a big difference between Dirichlet forms with finite jump size and local Dirichlet forms. \S9. ``Measure perturbations and generalized eigenfunctions''. In this section, the authors define perturbations of Dirichlet forms by measures and generalized eigenfunctions. \S10. ``The ground state representation''. \S11. ``A Caccioppoli-type inequality''. This section estimates the energy measure of generalized eigenfunctions. \S12. ``A Shnol'-type inequality''. \S13. ``The spectrum and generalized eigenfunctions''. In this section, by using a Shnol'-type inequality, it is proved that under certain conditions a generalized eigenvalue is in the spectrum. \S 14. ``Applications and examples''. In this section, the authors discuss various situations in which their results can be applied. It is decomposed into four subsections: Strongly local forms; Dirichlet forms on graphs; Exponentially decaying jumping kernel; \(\alpha\)-stable processes.