Symmetrized and non-symmetrizedasymptotic mean value Laplacian in metric measure spaces

The asymptotic mean value Laplacian—AMV Laplacian—extends the Laplace operator from $\mathbb {R}^n$ to metric measure spaces through limits of averaging integrals. The AMV Laplacian is however not a symmetric operator in general. Therefore, we consider a symmetric version of the AMV Laplacian, and focus lies on when the symmetric and non-symmetric AMV Laplacians coincide. Besides Riemannian and 3D contact sub-Riemannian manifolds, we show that they are identical on a large class of metric measure spaces, including locally Ahlfors regular spaces with suitably vanishing distortion. In addition, we study the context of weighted domains of $\mathbb {R}^n$ —where the two operators typically differ—and provide explicit formulae for these operators, including points where the weight vanishes.