Sobolev spaces, Laplacian, and heat kernel on Alexandrov spaces (Q5950064)

This paper is about analysis on Alexandrov spaces. Earlier work of Otsu and the third of these authors demonstrated the existence of a \(C^{1}\)-differentiable structure on the set of nonsingular points. This allows one to define \(L^{p}\) and \(W^{1,p}.\) The first main result here is that if \(\Omega \) is relatively compact, then \(( W^{1,2}_{0} (\Omega) \subset L^{2} (\Omega))\) is compact. They define a Dirichlet form on \(( W^{1,2}_{0} (\Omega) \times W^{1,2}_{0}(\Omega))\) and a corresponding Laplacian. This Laplacian has discrete spectrum and its eigenfunctions form a complete basis for \(W^{1,2}_{0} (\Omega) \) and \(L^{2} (\Omega).\) The existence of a heat kernel is proved and it is shown that solutions to the heat equation and eigenfunctions of the Laplacian are locally Hölder continuous.