Comparison inequalities for heat semigroups and heat kernels on metric measure spaces

We prove a certain inequality for a subsolution of the heat equation associated with a regular Dirichlet form. As a consequence of this inequality, we obtain various interesting comparison inequalities for heat semigroups and heat kernels, which can be used for obtaining pointwise estimates of heat kernels. As an example of application, we present a new method of deducing sub-Gaussian upper bounds of the heat kernel from on-diagonal bounds and tail estimates. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.