Markovian Extensions of Symmetric Second Order Elliptic Differential Operators

We give a complete classification of the Markovian self-adjoint extensions of the minimal realization of a second order elliptic differential operator on a bounded n-dimensional domain by providing an explicit one-to-one correspondence between such extensions and the class of Dirichlet forms on the boundary which are additively decomposable by the bilinear form of the Dirichlet-to-Neumann operator plus a Markovian form. By such a result two further equivalent classifications are provided: the first one is expressed in terms of a decomposition of the bilinear forms associated to the extensions, the second one uses the decomposition of the resolvents provided by the Krein formula. The Markovian part of the decomposition allows to characterize the operator domain of the corresponding extension in terms of Wentzell-type boundary conditions. Some analogous results hold also in a nonlinear setting.