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Non ultracontractive heat kernel bounds by Lyapunov conditions

Nash and Sobolev inequalities are known to be equivalent to ultracontractive properties of heat-like Markov semigroups, hence to uniform on-diagonal bounds on their kernel densities. In non ultracontractive settings, such bounds can not hold, and (necessarily weaker, non uniform) bounds on the semigroups can be derived by means of weighted Nash (or super-Poincaré) inequalities. The purpose of this note is to show how to check these weighted Nash inequalities in concrete examples, in a very simple and general manner. We also deduce off-diagonal bounds for the Markov kernels of the semigroups, refining E. B. Davies' original argument.