A general correspondence between Dirichlet forms and right processes

Abstract

The theory of Dirichlet forms as originated by Beurling-Deny and developed particularly by Fukushima and Silverstein, is a natural functional analytic extension of classical (and axiomatic) potential theory. Although some parts of it have abstract measure theoretic versions, the basic general construction of a Hunt process properly associated with the form, obtained by Fukushima and Silverstein, requires the form to be defined on a locally compact separable space with a Radon measure $m$ and the form to be regular (in the sense of the continuous functions of compact support being dense in the domain of the form, both in the supremum norm and in the natural norm given by the form and the $L^2(m)$-space). This setting excludes infinite dimensional situations. In this letter we announce that there exists an extension of Fukushima-Silverstein's construction of the associated process to the case where the space is only supposed to be metrizable and the form is not required to be regular.