Weak compactness in variable exponent spaces (Q2039828)

The paper is devoted to the study of (relative) compactness of sets in separable variable Lebesgue spaces. Let \((\Omega,\Sigma,\mu)\) be a finite separable measurable space and \(p:\Omega\to [1,\infty)\) be a \(\mu\)-measurable function such that \(p_+:=\mathrm{ ess\,sup}_{t\in\Omega}\,p(t)<\infty\). The variable Lebesgue space \(L^{p(\cdot)}(\Omega)\) consists of all \(\mu\)-measurable real-valued functions \(f\) on \(\Omega\) such that \(\varrho_{p(\cdot)}(f):=\int_\Omega|f(t)|^{p(t)}d\mu(t)<\infty\). This is a separable Banach space with respect to the norm \(\|f\|_{p(\cdot)}:=\inf\{\lambda>0:\varrho_{p(\cdot)}(f/\lambda)\le 1\}\). One of the main results of the paper (Theorem~4.4) says that a subset \(S\subset L^{p(\cdot)}(\Omega)\) is relatively weakly compact in \(L^{p(\cdot)}(\Omega)\) if it is norm bounded, \[\lim_{\lambda\to 0}\sup_{f\in S}\frac{1}{\lambda} \int_{\Omega\setminus p^{-1}(\{1\})} |\lambda f(t)|^{p(t)}\,d\mu(t)=0,\] and \[\lim_{\mu(A)\to 0}\sup_{f\in S}\int_{\Omega\cap p^{-1}(\{1\})}|f(t)| \,d\mu(t)=0.\] As an application of these results, it is shown that a separable variable Lebesgue space \(L^{p(\cdot)}(\Omega)\) has the weak Banach-Saks property, that is, each weakly convergent sequence \((x_n)\) in \(L^{p(\cdot)}(\Omega)\) has a subsequence \((x_{n_k})\), which is Cesàro convergent, that is, \[\lim_{k\to\infty}\left\| \frac1k \sum_{j=1}^k x_{n_j}-x\right\|_{p(\cdot)}=0.\]