Vector analysis for Dirichlet forms and quasilinear PDE and SPDE on metric measure spaces

Abstract

Starting with a regular symmetric Dirichlet form on a locally compact separable metric space $X$, our paper studies elements of vector analysis, $L_p$-spaces of vector fields and related Sobolev spaces. These tools are then employed to obtain existence and uniqueness results for some quasilinear elliptic PDE and SPDE in variational form on $X$ by standard methods. For many of our results locality is not assumed, but most interesting applications involve local regular Dirichlet forms on fractal spaces such as nested fractals and Sierpinski carpets.