BMO for nondoubling measures (Q1567177)

The goal of this work is to determine which properties of the space \(\text{BMO}(\mu)\) of functions such that \(\int_{Q}|f-f_{Q}|d\mu \leq C\mu (Q),\) that are standard in the case of a doubling measure, extend or fail to extend to the case in which \(\mu \) is not a doubling measure. The first main result is that the John-Nirenberg property extends to the case in which \(\mu \) is any suitably rotated continuous positive Radon measure. That is, in this case there are constants \(c_{1}\) and \(c_{2}\) independent of \(f\) such that \[ \mu (\{x\in Q:|f(x)-f_{Q}|>\lambda \})\leq c_{1}\exp \left( \frac{-c_{2\lambda } }{\left\|f\right\|_{*}}\right) \mu (Q) \] for all cubes with sides parallel to the coordinate axes. The main step in proving this result is a covering lemma that extends the usual type of covering lemma used for doubling measures. The fact that one is working on cubes becomes crucial in this case, in contrast to that of doubling measures in which the same results typically hold whether one defines BMO with respect to cubes or balls. The authors show that the two BMOs are decidedly different in the case of nondoubling measures and the reasons for this difference are described aptly and succinctly: (i) in contrast to the case of balls, a cube may be covered by a finite number of subcubes and (ii) cross sections of intersected cubes have equal diameter while diameters of sections of intersected balls can decay rapidly as the balls are pulled apart. Other results include descriptions of preduals, Calderón-Zygmund decomposition, and a local version of BMO in which the norm is defined only with respect to those cubes centered at a point in the support of \(\mu \).