1 DIFFUSIONS ON FRACTALS Martin T. Barlow University of British Columbia Vancouver, B.C. Canada V6T 1Z2
[email protected] CONTENTS 1. Introduction 2 2. The Sierpinski Gasket 7 3. Fractional Diffusions 27 4. Dirichlet Forms, Markov Processes, and Electrical Networks 46 5. Geometry of Regular Finitely Ramified Fractals 59 6. Renormalization on Finitely Ramified Fractals 79 7. Diffusions on p.c.f.s.s. Sets 94 8. Transition Density Estimates 106 References 114 2 1. Introduction. The notes are based on lectures given in St. Flour in 1995, and cover, in greater detail, most of the course given there. The word \fractal" was coined by Mandelbrot [Man] in the 1970s, but of course sets of this type have been familiar for a long time { their early history being as a collection of pathological examples in analysis. There is no generally agreed exact definition of the word \fractal", and attempts so far to give a precise definition have been unsatisfactory, leading to classes of sets which are either too large, or too small, or both. This ambiguity is not a problem for this course: a more precise title would be “Diffusions on some classes of regular self-similar sets". Initial interest in the properties of processes on fractals came from mathematical physicists working in the theory of disordered media. Certain media can be modelled by percolation clusters at criticality, which are expected to exhibit fractal-like prop- erties. Following the initial papers [AO], [RT], [GAM1-GAM3] a very substantial physics literature has developed { see [HBA] for a survey and bibliography.