Monotone approximation of energy functionals for mappings into metric spaces. II (Q1962855)

Let \(M\) be a topological Lusin space, \(\mathcal M\) its Borel \(\sigma\)-field and \(m\) a \(\sigma\)-finite positive measure on \((M,\mathcal M)\). Given a symmetric submarkovian semigroup \((P_t)_{t>0}\) on \((M, \mathcal M, m)\) and a metric space \((N,d)\), approximated energy functionals \(E^{n,0}(f)\) and \(E^{n,\kappa}(f)\), \(\kappa>0\), for mappings \(f:M\to N\) are studied where \[ \begin{aligned} E^{n,0} (f) &:= \frac 1{2t_n} \int_M\int_M d {}^2(f(x),f(y)) P_{t_n}(x,dy) m(dx),\\ E^{n,\kappa}(f) &:= \frac 1{\kappa t_n}\int_M\int_M \log \cosh (\sqrt\kappa\cdot d(f(x),f(y))) P_{t_n}(x,dy) m(dx), \end{aligned} \] and \(t_n=2^{-n}t_0\). Previous work showed that \((E^{n,0})\) is not always increasing in \(n\), in fact, it may be decreasing even if \(M\) is a Riemannian manifold and \(N=M\) [J. Reine Angew. Math. 486, 129-151 (1997; Zbl 0879.58018)]. In the present paper, the author shows that for any mapping \(f:M\to N\) the approximations \(E^{n,\kappa}(f)\) are increasing in \(n\) provided the metric space \((N,d)\) has curvature \(\geq -\kappa\) [for the definition see Expo. Math. 17, 35-47 (1999)]. Moreover, he proves the following: Assuming that the semigroup \((P_t)_{t>0}\) is assosciated with a strongly local, quasi-regular Dirichlet form and the metric space \((N,d)\) has relatively compact balls and lower bounded curvature, for any bounded \(L^2\)-mapping \(f:M\to N\) the approximations \(E^{n,\kappa}(f)\) converge for all \(\kappa\geq 0\) and the limit is a lower semicontinuous functional which is independent of \(\kappa\). Using resolvents instead of semigroups even better results are obtained.