We prove that, in a setting of local Dirichlet forms on metric measure spaces, a two-sided sub-Gaussian estimate of the heat kernel is equivalent to the conjunction of the volume doubling propety, the elliptic Harnack inequality and a certain estimate of the capacity between concentric balls. The main technical tool is the equivalence between the capacity estimate and the estimate of a mean exit time in a ball, that uses two-sided estimates of a Green function in a ball.

In this paper we study the balayage of semi-Dirichlet forms. We present new results on balayaged functions and balayaged measures of semi-Dirichlet forms. Some of the results are new even in the Dirichlet forms setting.

Let $X$ be a diffusion process, which is assumed to be associated with a (non-symmetric) strongly local Dirichlet form $(\mathcal{E},\mathcal{D}(\mathcal{E}))$ on $L^2(E;m)$. For $u\in{\mathcal{D}}({\mathcal{E}})_e$, the extended Dirichlet space, we investigate some properties of the Girsanov transformed process $Y$ of $X$. First, let $\widehat{X}$ be the dual process of $X$ and $\widehat{Y}$ the Girsanov transformed process of $\widehat{X}$. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for $(Y,\widehat{Y})$ to be in duality with respect to the measure $e^{2u}m$. We also construct a counterexample, which shows that this condition may not be satisfied and hence $(Y,\widehat{Y})$ may not be dual processes. Then we present a sufficient condition under which $Y$ is associated with a semi-Dirichlet form. Moreover, we give an explicit representation of the semi-Dirichlet form.

Maximum principles for subharmonic functions in the framework of quasi-regular local semi-Dirichlet forms admitting lower bounds are presented. As applications, we give weak and strong maximum principles for (local) subsolutions of a second order elliptic differential operator on the domain of Euclidean space under conditions on coefficients, which partially generalize the results by Stampacchia.

We define sets with finitely ramified cell structure, which are generalizations of post-crit8cally finite self-similar sets introduced by Kigami and of fractafolds introduced by Strichartz. In general, we do not assume even local self-similarity, and allow countably many cells connected at each junction point. In particular, we consider post-critically infinite fractals. We prove that if Kigami's resistance form satisfies certain assumptions, then there exists a weak Riemannian metric such that the energy can be expressed as the integral of the norm squared of a weak gradient with respect to an energy measure. Furthermore, we prove that if such a set can be homeomorphically represented in harmonic coordinates, then for smooth functions the weak gradient can be replaced by the usual gradient. We also prove a simple formula for the energy measure Laplacian in harmonic coordinates.