The structure of Sobolev extension operators (Q742877)

Let \(L^{m,p} ({\mathbb R}^n)\) denote the Sobolev space of functions whose \(m\)-th-order derivatives lie in \(L^p({\mathbb R}^n)\). For \(E \subset {\mathbb R}^n \), denote by \(L^{m,p} (E)\) the space of restrictions to \(E\) of functions \(F \in L^{m,p} ({\mathbb R}^n)\). The authors are interested in \(E\) being a finite set and linear extension operators \(T: L^{m,p} (E) \to L^{m,p} ({\mathbb R}^n)\) having a special structure. Let \(Tf (x):= \sum_{y \in E} \lambda (x,y)\, f(y)\), \(x \in {\mathbb R}^n\), with coefficients \(\lambda (x,y)\) independent of \(f\). \(T\) is of finite depth \(D \in \mathbb{N}\) if, for each fixed \(x\), at most \(D\) of the coefficients \(\lambda (x,y)\) are nonzero. The main result of the paper is the following negative result. Let \(p>2\), \(A\geq 1\) and \(D\geq 1\) be given. Then there exists a finite set \(E \subset {\mathbb R}^2 \) such that \(L^{2,p} (E)\) has no extension operator of norm \(A\) and depth \(D\). The proof is constructive.