Laplacians on infinite graphs: Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions (Q1943739)

In the present paper, the authors study a class of graph Laplacians with certain regularity properties. The class studied contains the Dirichlet and Neumann Laplacians, and in the particular situation of locally finite graphs, they show that these are the largest and smallest Markovian restrictions of the standard graph Laplacian (Theorem 5.2). Moreover, the authors study the stochastic completeness (Theorem 6.1) and essential selfadjointness (Theorem 6.2) for a wide class of graph Laplacians. In addition to these results, the authors present a general maximum principle for graph Laplacians (Theorem 7.1) and a complete characterization for positivity improving semigroups associated to the graph Laplacians (Theorem 7.3). Their Theorem 8.1(b) gives a new proof of a Li-type theorem obtained in [\textit{M. Keller}, \textit{D. Lenz}, \textit{H. Vogt} and \textit{R. Wojciechowski}, ``Note on basic features of large time behaviour of heat kernels'', to appear in J. Reine Angew. Math., \url{doi:10.1515/crelle-2013-0070}]. It states that the heat kernel \(p_t(x,y)\) of the semigroup \(e^{-tL}\) associated to a selfadjoint non-negative restriction \(L\) of the standard graph Laplacian \(\tilde L\) satisfies \[ \frac{\log p_t(x,y)}t\to-E_0 \text{ as } t\to\infty, \] where \(E_0\) is the infimum of the spectrum of \(L\). The article concludes with a discussion of the uniqueness of selfadjoint restrictions of the standard graph Laplacian and its boundedness. Two appendices complete this article, which is self-contained and very well written.