The Davies method revisited for heat kernel upper bounds of regular Dirichlet forms on metric measure spaces

Abstract

We apply the Davies method to prove that for any regular Dirichlet form on a metric measure space, an off-diagonal stable-type upper bound of the heat kernel is equivalent to the conjunction of the on-diagonal upper bound, a cutoff inequality on any two concentric balls, and the jump kernel upper bound, for any walk dimension. If in addition the jump kernel vanishes, that is, if the Dirichlet form is strongly local, we obtain sub-Gaussian upper bound. This gives a unified approach to obtaining heat kernel upper bounds for both the non-local and the local Dirichlet forms.