Improved Sobolev inequalities on the Heisenberg group (Q2488267)

In this paper the author proves a refined version of the Sobolev inequality on the Heisenberg group, extending to this context the Euclidean result by \textit{G. Bianchi} and \textit{H. Egnell} [J. Funct. Anal. 100, 18--24 (1991; Zbl 0755.46014)]. Let us denote by \(\xi =(z,t)=(x,y,t)\) a point of \(\mathbb{R}^{2n+1}\). The Heisenberg group \(\mathbb{H}^{n}\) is the homogeneous Lie group \(\mathbb{R}^{2n+1}\) with group law: \[ \xi \circ \xi'=(z+z',t+t'+2(\langle x',y \rangle -\langle x,y' \rangle )) \] for every \(\xi =(x,y,t), \xi'=(x',y',t') \in \mathbb{H}^n\) where \(\langle\, ,\, \rangle \) denotes the inner product in \(\mathbb{R}^n\). We will denote by \[ \nabla_{\mathbb{H}^n}=(X_1, \ldots , X_n, Y_1, \ldots , Y_n) \] the subelliptic Heisenberg gradient where \(X_j=\partial_{x_j}+2y_j\partial_t,\;Y_j=\partial_{y_j}-2x_j\partial_t\) for every \(j=1, \ldots n\). We shall denote by \(S^1_0(\mathbb{H}^n)\) the Folland-Stein space defined as the completion of \(C_0^{\infty}(\mathbb{H}^n)\) with respect to the norm \(||\nabla_{\mathbb{H}^n}f||_2 \). We denote \[ M=\{ f \in S_0^1(\mathbb{H}^n) |\;\;||\nabla_{\mathbb{H}^n}f||_2^2 =S||f||_{2^*}^2 \} \] where \(S=\inf_{f\in S_0^1(\mathbb{H}^n)}||\nabla_{\mathbb{H}^n}f||_2^2 /||f||_{2^*}^2\) and \(2^*=2Q/(Q-2), Q=2n+2\) is called the homogeneous dimension of \(\mathbb{H}^n\). Define the distance between \(M\) and a function \(f \in S_0^1\) as \[ d(f, M)=\inf_{u\in M}||\nabla_{\mathbb{H}^n}(f-u)||_2. \] The author proves the following: Theorem. There exists a positive constant \(\alpha\), depending only on the dimension \(Q\) such that \[ ||\nabla_{\mathbb{H}^n}f||^2_2-S||f||^2_{2^*} \geq \alpha\;d(f,M)^2,\;\;\forall f \in S^1_0(\mathbb{H}^n). \] Furthermore, the result is optimal in the sense that it is false if the remainder term is replaced by \(d(f,M)^{\beta}||\nabla_{\mathbb{H}^n}f||_2^{2-\beta}\) with \(\beta <2\).