Rough Hypoellipticity for the Heat Equation in Dirichlet Spaces

Abstract: This paper aims at proving the local boundedness and continuity of solutions of the heat equation in the context of Dirichlet spaces under some rather weak additional assumptions. We consider symmetric local regular Dirichlet forms which satisfy mild assumptions concerning (a) the existence of cut-off functions, (b) a local ultracontractivity hypothesis, and (c) a weak off-diagonal upper bound. In this setting, local weak solutions of the heat equation, and their time derivatives, are shown to be locally bounded; they are further locally continuous, if the semigroup admits a locally continuous density function. Applications of the results are provided including discussion on the existence of locally bounded heat kernel; $L^\infty$ structure results for ancient solutions of the heat equation. The last section presents a special case where the $L^\infty$ off-diagonal upper bound follows from the ultracontractivity property of the semigroup. This paper is a continuation of [7].