Endpoint Sobolev bounds for fractional Hardy-Littlewood maximal operators (Q2672672)

The paper under review is concerned with the regularity properties of the fractional Hardy-Littlewood maximal function on \(\mathbb{R}^d\). Given a parameter \(\alpha \in [0,d)\), let \(M_\alpha\) denote the centered fractional Hardy-Littlewood maximal function defined by \[ M_\alpha f(x) = \sup_{r>0} \frac{r^\alpha}{|B(x,r)|} \int_{B(x,r)} |f|, \] where \(B(x,r)\) denotes the ball of radius \(r\) centered at \(x\in \mathbb{R}^d\). It is shown that for any \(f\) in the Sobolev space \(W^{1,p}(\mathbb{R}^d)\), \(M_\alpha f\) is weakly differentiable and the following inequality holds with \(1/p^\ast = 1/p - \alpha/d\), \[ || \nabla M_\alpha f ||_{p^\ast} \leq C_{d,\alpha,p} || \nabla f ||_p, \] provided that \(1\leq p < d/\alpha\) and \(0<\alpha<d\). Similar inequality is established for the uncentered fractional Hardy-Littlewood maximal function. For the endpoint case \(p=1\), the inequality had been left open for the range \(0<\alpha<1\). It is noted that, for the usual Hardy-Littlewood maximal function (the case \(\alpha=0\)), the inequality at the endpoint \(p=1\) is still left open except for the one-dimensional case and some partial results in higher dimensions. For proof of the inequality, the author develops a new inequality for a dyadic version of the fractional Hardy-Littlewood maximal function.