ter Elst, A F MRobinson, DerekSikora, Adam2015-12-071424-3199http://hdl.handle.net/1885/28126We establish the short-time asymptotic behaviour of the Markovian semigroups associated with strongly local Dirichlet forms under very general hypotheses. Our results apply to a wide class of strongly elliptic, subelliptic and degenerate elliptic operators. In the degenerate case the asymptotics incorporate possible non-ergodicity.200710.1007/s00028-006-0247-x2015-12-07