\(L^p\)-boundedness for time-frequency paraproducts. II (Q1601990)

This paper contains the technical heart of results announced and outlined in [\textit{J. E. Gilbert} and \textit{A. R. Nahmod}, ``Bilinear operators with non-smooth symbol''. I, J. Fourier Anal. Appl. 7, 435-467 (2001; Zbl 0994.42014)]. The affine invariant structure of the time-frequency paraproducts that arise in discretizing bilinear operators with nonsmooth symbols, together with geometric properties of their associated phase plane decompositions allow Littlewood-Paley techniques to be applied locally on trees. The so-called paraproduct operators take the form \[ f,g\mapsto \sum_Q \frac{1}{\sqrt|I_Q|} c_Q \langle f,\phi_Q^{(1)}\rangle \langle g,\phi_Q^{(2)}\rangle \phi_Q^{(3)}. \] The sum extends over a family of `quartiles' in the time-frequency plane, while the functions \(\phi_Q^{(i)}\) represent wave-packets localized on certain `frequency-sibling' tiles comprising those quartiles. Two main issues, both extremely delicate, need to be addressed in order to establish boundedness of the bilinear singular integrals in question, namely, the reduction of the bilinear operators to the case of paraproducts and, secondly, the boundedness of the paraproducts themselves. The reduction to paraproducts allows one to impose a strong cancellation condition in the form of separation of the supports of the Fourier transforms of the \({\phi^{(i)}}\). The \(L^p\)-boundedness then is established via weak-type estimates for the paraproducts and multilinear interpolation. A greedy algorithm or `tree-pruning' process is used to break up the paraproduct into more manageable subseries, each of which can then be broken further into `forests' of one type on which not too many coefficients are too large and a second type that live essentially in small sets. The forests themselves are comprised of `trees' whose elements are ordered in terms of intersection properties of the quartiles.