Harnack Inequalities for Functional SDEs with Multiplicative Noise and Applications

By constructing a new coupling, the log-Harnack inequality is established for the functional solution of a delay stochastic differential equation with multiplicative noise. As applications, the strong Feller property and heat kernel estimates w.r.t. quasi-invariant probability measures are derived for the associated transition semigroup of the solution. The dimension-free Harnack inequality in the sense of \cite{W97} is also investigated.