This book deals with analytic treatments of Markov processes. Symmetric Dirichlet forms and their associated Markov processes are important and powerful tools in the theory of Markov processes and their applications. The theory is well studied and used in various fields. In this monograph, we intend to generalize the theory to non-symmetric and time dependent semi-Dirichlet forms. By this generalization, we can cover the wide class of Markov processes and analytic theory which do not possess the dual Markov processes. In particular, under the semi-Dirichlet form setting, the stochastic calculus is not well established yet. In this monograph, we intend to give an introduction to such calculus. Furthermore, basic examples different from the symmetric cases are given. The text is written for graduate students, but also researchers.

"This book deals with analytic treatments of Markov processes. Symmetric Dirichlet forms and their associated Markov processes are important and powerful tools in the theory of Markov processes and their applications. The theory is well studied and used in various fields. In this monograph, we intend to generalize the theory to non-symmetric and time dependent semi-Dirichlet forms. By this generalizaiton, we can cover the wide class of Markov processes and analytic theory which do not poccess the dual Markov processes. In particular, under the semi-Dirichlet form setting, the stochastic calculus is not well established yet. In this monograph, we intend to give an introduction to such calculus. Furthermore, basic examples different from the symmetric cases are given. The text is written for graduate students, but also reserachers"--Page 4 of cover.

The series is aimed specifically at publishing peer reviewed reviews and contributions presented at workshops and conferences. Each volume is associated with a particular conference, symposium or workshop. These events cover various topics within pure and applied mathematics and provide up-to-date coverage of new developments, methods and applications.

In this book, the functional inequalities are introduced to describe:(i) the spectrum of the generator: the essential and discrete spectrums, high order eigenvalues, the principle eigenvalue, and the spectral gap;(ii) the semigroup properties: the uniform intergrability, the compactness, the convergence rate, and the existence of density;(iii) the reference measure and the intrinsic metric: the concentration, the isoperimetic inequality, and the transportation cost inequality.

Since the publication of the first edition in 1994, this book has attracted constant interests from readers and is by now regarded as a standard reference for the theory of Dirichlet forms. For the present second edition, the authors not only revise

This work covers two topics in detail: Fourier analysis, with emphasis on positivity and also on some function spaces and multiplier theorems; and one-parameter operator semigroups with emphasis on Feller semigroups and Lp-sub-Markovian semigroups. In addition, Dirichlet forms are treated.