We study the appropriate versions of parabolicity stochastic completeness and related Liouville properties for a general class of operators which include the p-Laplace operator, and the non linear singular operators in non-diagonal form considered by J. Serrin and collaborators.
IntroductionThe starting point of the present note is the circle of ideas in classical potential theory, which relate the parabolicity and stochastic completeness of a manifold on one hand, and their function theoretic counterparts on the other, and in particular results due to Khas'minskii which provide sufficient conditions for a manifold to be parabolic, respectively stochastically complete. These ideas allow also to establish comparison theorems with model manifolds in the sense of Greene and Wu under curvature conditions. It was recently shown by the authors that the parabolicity/stochastic completeness of a manifold may be described in terms of suitable versions of a global weak maximum principle. Explicitly, M is parabolic (resp. stochastically complete) if and only if for every u ∈ C 2 (M ), u bounded above, and for every η > 0 we have inf {u>sup u−η} ∆u < 0 (resp. ≤ 0) (see [17] and [18]).