Subelliptic Sobolev spaces for manifolds with symmetries (Q1775513)

The authors consider a differentiable manifold (without an a priori given Riemannian structure), co-compact relative to a transformation group and constant locally subelliptic operators, invariant with respect to the group. These operators are of a more general class than the subelliptic class, that is, they are not necessarily sums of squares of invariant vector fields. However, there are second-order differential operators whose quadratic forms in restriction to small neighborhoods are bounded from below by subelliptic quadratic forms, and therefore also satisfy Sobolev inequalities. Existence of minimizers follows from the concentration compactness argument.