Isomorphic properties of intersection bodies (Q647592)

Intersection bodies have played an important role in the Busemann-Petty problem. Its solution was the result of many contributors, among them the first author of the present paper. In previous work, Koldobsky introduced the concept of \(k\)-intersection bodies which are related to a generalization of the Busemann-Petty problem. This class of \(k\)-intersection bodies, denoted by \({\mathcal{I}}_k^n\), has alternatively a Fourier characterization: a body \(K\) belongs to \({\mathcal{I}}_k^n\) if and only if \(\| . \|_K^{-k}\) is a positive definite distribution in \(\mathbb{R}^n\). A different generalization of intersection bodies, \(\mathcal{BP}_k^n\), was given by G. Zhang via the spherical Radon transform \(R_{n-k}\) which acts from the space of continuous functions on \(\mathbb{S}^{n-1}\) to the space of continuous functions on the Grassmannians. There has been a lot of research related to these generalizations mostly surrounding the lower dimensional Busemann-Petty and class containment inequalities, but not many results addressed the isomorphic properties of intersection bodies. In this paper, the authors prove several isomorphic results between intersection bodies and their generalizations. Among them, we note an estimate on the outer volume ratio from a convex symmetric body in \(\mathbb{R}^n\) and the class \(\mathcal{BP}_k^n\), \(1 \leq k \leq n-1\), and the following generalization of a well-known result by Hansley and Borell: if \(K\) is a symmetric convex body in \(\mathbb{R}^n\) and, for \(1 \leq k \leq n-1\), its \(k\)-intersection body \(I_k(K)\) exists and is convex, then its Banach-Mazur distance to the Euclidean unit ball in \(\mathbb{R}^n\) is bounded by a constant depending only on \(k\).