Boundedness and continuity of the Lévy transform in analysis (Q1427629)

In previous papers [\textit{L. Chevalier}, Adv. Math. 138, No.~1, 182--210 (1998; Zbl 0924.42015); Potential Anal. 12, No.~4, 419--439 (2000; Zbl 0968.42013)] the author has obtained a decomposition of \(| f| \), where \(f\) is a function defined on \(\mathbb R^n\), that is analogous to the one proved by H. Tanaka for martingales (the so-called `Tanaka formula'). More precisely, the decomposition has the form \(| f| =\tilde f+D^0_*(f)\), where \(D^\ast_0(f)\) is (a variant of) the density of the area integral associated with \(f\). In this paper, the author is interested in boundedness and continuity properties of the mapping \(f\mapsto\tilde f\) (which he calls the Lévy transform in analysis) on some classical function or distribution spaces. As was shown in the earlier papers cited above, the above (non-linear) decomposition is bounded in \(L^p\) for every \(p\in[1,+\infty)\), i.e., one has \(\| \tilde f\| _p\leq C_p\| f\| _p\), where \(C_p\) is a constant depending only on \(p\). Nevertheless, the methods in the above cited articles both gave constants \(C_p\) whose order of magnitude near 1 is \(O(1/(p-1))\). The aim of this paper is two-fold: first, to improve the preceding result and answer a natural question, by proving that the best constants \(C_p\) are bounded near 1. Second, to prove that the Lévy transform \(f\mapsto\tilde f\) is continuous on the Hardy spaces \(H^p\) with \(p>n/(n+1)\).