Geodesic inversion and Sobolev spaces on Heisenberg type groups (Q2368527)

The class of Heisenberg type groups was introduced by Kaplan in the 1980's and these groups provide a unified way of studying many problems on real rank one simple Lie groups by reducing to problems on the associated Iwasawa \(N\)-groups. If \(\sigma\) is the geodesic inversion on a Heisenberg type group \(N\) with homogeneous dimension \(Q\) and \(S\) is the Jacobian of \(\sigma\), then in this paper the authors prove that, when \(-{1\over 2}Q<\alpha<{1\over 2}Q\), the operators \(T_\alpha: f\to S^{{1\over 2}-{\alpha\over Q}}(f\circ\sigma)\) are bounded on certain homogeneous Sobolev spaces \(H^\alpha(N)\) if and only if \(N\) is an Iwasawa \(N\)-group. As an interesting application the authors obtain an elementary proof of the well-known result of Kunze and Stein on the uniform boundedness of representations of certain real rank one simple Lie groups on the space \(H^\alpha(N)\).