Singular spherical maximal operators on a class of two step nilpotent Lie groups (Q1885663): Difference between revisions

The aim of this paper is to obtain the \(L^{p}\)-boundedness of a maximal operator on a group of Heisenberg type. A class of groups of Heisenberg type will be introduced as follows: Let \(G\) be a finite dimensional two step nilpotent group which we may identify with its Lie algebra \(\mathfrak{g}\) by the exponent map. We assume that \(\mathfrak{g}\) splits as a direct sum \(\mathfrak{g} = \mathfrak{m} \oplus \mathfrak{z}\) so that \[ [\mathfrak{m}, \mathfrak{m}] \subset \mathfrak{z}, [\mathfrak{m}, \mathfrak{z}] = \{ 0 \} \] and that \(\dim \mathfrak{m} =d, \dim \mathfrak{z} =m\). Nondegeneracy hypothesis: For every nonzero linear functional \(\omega \in \mathfrak{z}^{*}\) the bilinear form \[ \mathcal{T}_{\omega}: \mathfrak{m} \times \mathfrak{m} \longrightarrow \mathbb{R}, \quad (X,Y) \longmapsto \omega([X,Y]) \] is nondegenerate. There is a natural dilation structure relative to \(\mathfrak{m}\) and \(\mathfrak{z}\), namely for \(X \in \mathfrak{m}\) and \(U \in \mathfrak{z}\) we consider the dilations \(\delta_{t}: (X,U) \longmapsto (tX, t^{2}U).\) In exponential coordinates \((x, u)\), \(x \in \mathbb{R}^{d}\), \(u \in \mathbb{R}^{m},\) the group multiplication is given by \[ (x,u)\cdot (y,v) =(x+y, u+v+x^{t}Jy) \] where \(x^{t}Jy=(x^{t}J_{1}y, \ldots , x^{t}J_{m}y) \in \mathbb{R}^{m}\) and the \(J_{i}\) are skew symmetric matrices acting on \(\mathbb{R}^{d}\). Let \(\Sigma\) be a smooth convex hypersurface in \(\mathfrak{m}\) and let \(\mu\) be a compactly supported smooth density on \(\Sigma\). Curvature hypothesis: The Gaussian curvature of \(\Sigma\) does not vanish on the support of \(\mu\). Define the dilation \(\mu_{t}\) by \[ \langle \mu_{t}, f \rangle = \int f(tx, 0) d\mu(x) \] and define for Schwartz functions the maximal operator \(M\) by \[ Mf(x,u)=\sup_{t>0}|f*\mu_{t}(x,u)|. \] The authors prove the following result. Theorem. Suppose \(d>0\). Then \(M\) extends to a bounded operator on \(L^{p}(G)\) if and only if \(p> d/(d-1)\). This theorem is an analogue of \textit{E. M. Stein's} theorem [Proc. National Acad. Sci. USA 73, 2174--2175 (1976; Zbl 0332.42018)] in the Euclidean case and this improves a result by \textit{A. Nevo} and \textit{S. Thangavelu} [Adv. Math. 127, 307--334 (1997; Zbl 0888.22002)].