Endpoint Sobolev bounds for fractional Hardy–Littlewood maximal operators

Abstract

Let $$0<\alpha <d$$ 0 < α < d and $$1\le p<d/\alpha $$ 1 ≤ p < d / α . We present a proof that for all $$f\in W^{1,p}({\mathbb {R}}^d)$$ f ∈ W 1 , p ( R d ) both the centered and the uncentered Hardy–Littlewood fractional maximal operator $${\mathrm {M}}_\alpha f$$ M α f are weakly differentiable and $$ \Vert \nabla {\mathrm {M}}_\alpha f\Vert _{p^*} \le C_{d,\alpha ,p} \Vert \nabla f\Vert _p , $$ ‖ ∇ M α f ‖ p ∗ ≤ C d , α , p ‖ ∇ f ‖ p , where $$ p^* = (p^{-1}-\alpha /d)^{-1} . $$ p ∗ = ( p - 1 - α / d ) - 1 . In particular it covers the endpoint case $$p=1$$ p = 1 for $$0<\alpha <1$$ 0 < α < 1 where the bound was previously unknown. For $$p=1$$ p = 1 we can replace $$W^{1,1}({\mathbb {R}}^d)$$ W 1 , 1 ( R d ) by $$\mathrm {BV}({\mathbb {R}}^d)$$ BV ( R d ) . The ingredients used are a pointwise estimate for the gradient of the fractional maximal function, the layer cake formula, a Vitali type argument, a reduction from balls to dyadic cubes, the coarea formula, a relative isoperimetric inequality and an earlier established result for $$\alpha =0$$ α = 0 in the dyadic setting. We use that for $$\alpha >0$$ α > 0 the fractional maximal function does not use certain small balls. For $$\alpha =0$$ α = 0 the proof collapses.