Elliptic Harnack inequality and its applications on Finsler metric measure spaces

In this paper, we study the elliptic Harnack inequality and its applications on forward complete Finsler metric measure spaces under the conditions that the weighted Ricci curvature ${\mathrm{R}\mathrm{i}\mathrm{c}}_{\mathrm{\infty }}$ has non-positive lower bound and the distortion $\tau$ is of linear growth, $\mathrm{\mid }\tau \mathrm{\mid }\le ar+b$, where $a,b$ are some non-negative constants, $r=d(x_0,x)$ is the distance function for some point $x_0\in M$. We obtain an elliptic $p$-Harnack inequality for positive harmonic functions from a local uniform Poincaré inequality and a mean value inequality. As applications of the Harnack inequality, we derive the Hölder continuity estimate and a Liouville theorem for positive harmonic functions. Furthermore, we establish a gradient estimate for positive harmonic functions.