Stability of Kac regularity under domination of quadratic forms

Abstract

A domain is called Kac regular for a quadratic form on $L^2$ if the closure of all functions vanishing almost everywhere outside a closed subset of the domain coincides with the set of all functions vanishing almost everywhere outside the domain. It is shown that this notion is stable under domination of quadratic forms. As applications measure perturbations of quasi-regular Dirichlet forms, Cheeger energies on metric measure spaces and Schr\"odinger operators on manifolds are studied. Along the way a characterization of the Sobolev space with Dirichlet boundary conditions on domains in infinitesimally Riemannian metric measure spaces is obtained.