Improved Sobolev inequalities on groups of Iwasawa type in presence of symmetry (Q2480331)

Let \(G\) be a simple Lie group of real rank one, and let \(G=KAN\) be an Iwasawa decomposition. We assume that \(N\) is a Heisenberg type group with homogeneous dimension \(Q=\dim \mathfrak n + \dim \mathfrak z(\mathfrak n) \geq 3\). Here \(\mathfrak n\) is the Lie algebra of \(N\), and \(\mathfrak z(\mathfrak n)\) its center. Consider the following Sobolev inequality for the \(L^2\)-norm of the gradient \[ \| \nabla_N f\| ^2_2 \geq S\| f\| ^2_{2^*} \] for functions \(f\) belonging to an appropriate Sobolev space \(S_0^1(N)\) on \(N\). Here \(2^*=\frac{2Q}{Q-2}\), and \(S\) is the best embedding constant; it is the quotient \(\frac{\| \nabla_N f\| ^2_2}{\| f\| ^2_{2^*}}\) for \(f\) belonging to the \(\dim N+2\)-dimensional manifold \(\mathcal M\) of Sobolev minimizers in \(S_0^1(N)\). The main result of this paper is a lower bound for the quantity \[ \| \nabla_N f\| ^2_2 - S\| f\| ^2_{2^*} \] in terms of the distance \(d(f,\mathcal M)\). For functions \(f\) having partial symmetry, the author proves that this difference is bounded below by a multiple of the square of this distance, with the multiplication constant depending on the homogeneous dimension \(Q\) only. Moreover, he shows that this lower bound is sharp in an appropriate sense. A key argument in the proof is the study of the eigenvalues of the operators \(-U^{2-2^*}\Delta_N\) on \(S_0^1(N)\) for \(U\) certain functions in \(\mathcal M\) (and \(\Delta_N\) the Laplacian), and uses the Cayley transform and the principal series representations of \(G\).