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In this paper, we start by showing that the intertwining relationship between two minimal Markov semigroups acting on Hilbert spaces implies that any recurrent extensions, in the sense of Itô, of these semigroups satisfy the same intertwining identity. Under mild additional assumptions on the intertwining operator, we prove that the converse also holds. This connection, which relies on the representation of excursion quantities as developed by Fitzsimmons and Getoor (Illinois J. Math. 50 (2006) 413–437), enables us to give an interesting probabilistic interpretation of intertwining relationships between Markov semigroups via excursion theory: two such recurrent extensions that intertwine share, under an appropriate normalization, the same local time at the boundary point. Moreover, in the case when one of the (non-self-adjoint) semigroup intertwines with the one of a quasi-diffusion, we obtain an extension of Krein’s theory of strings by showing that its densely defined spectral measure is absolutely continuous with respect to the measure appearing in the Stieltjes representation of the Laplace exponent of the inverse local time. Finally, we illustrate our results with the class of positive self-similar Markov semigroups and also the reflected generalized Laguerre semigroups. For the latter, we obtain their spectral decomposition and provide, under some conditions, an explicit hypocoercivity $L^{2}$-rate of convergence to equilibrium which is expressed as the spectral gap perturbed by the spectral projection norms.

We develop a technique for "partially collapsing'' one Markov process to produce another. The state space of the new Markov process is obtained by a pinching operation that identifies points of the original state space via an equivalence relationship. To ensure that the new process is Markovian we need to introduce a randomized twist according to an appropriate probability kernel. Informally, this twist randomizes over the uncollapsed region of the state space when the process leaves the collapsed region. The "Markovianity'' of the new process is ensured by suitable intertwining relationships between the semigroup of the original process and the pinching and twisting operations. We construct the new Markov process, identify its resolvent and transition function and, under some natural assumptions, exhibit a core for its generator. We also investigate its excursion decomposition. We apply our theory to a number of examples, including Walsh's spider and a process similar to one introduced by Sowers in studying stochastic averaging.