Global existence and asymptotic behavior for nonlinear damped wave equations on measure spaces

This paper is concerned with the nonlinear damped wave equation on a measure space with a self-adjoint operator, instead of the standard Laplace operator. Under a certain decay estimate on the corresponding heat semigroup, we establish the linear estimates which generalize the so-called Matsumura estimates, and prove the small data global existence of solutions to the damped wave equation based on the linear estimates. Our approach is based on a direct spectral analysis analogous to the Fourier analysis. The self-adjoint operators treated in this paper include some important examples such as the Laplace operators on Euclidean spaces, the Dirichlet Laplacian on an arbitrary open set, the Robin Laplacian on an exterior domain, the Schrodinger operator, the elliptic operator, the Laplacian on Sierpinski gasket, and the fractional Laplacian.