Solyanik estimates and local Hölder continuity of halo functions of geometric maximal operators (Q887309)

Maximal functions have long played an important role in analysis. For instance, the Hardy-Littlewood maximal operator is used in the proof of the Lebesgue differentiation theorem and in the study of the boundedness of certain singular integral operators. In this paper, the authors are interested in the maximal operator \[ M_{\mathcal{B}}f(x)=\sup_{x\in R\in \mathcal{B}}\frac{1}{\left| R\right| }\int_{R}\left| f\right| , \] where \(\mathcal{B}\) is a basis of convex sets in \(\mathbb{R}^{n}\), and the corresponding halo function \[ \phi _{\mathcal{B}}(\alpha )=\sup_{E\subseteq \mathbb{R}^{n}:0<m(E)<\infty } \frac{1}{\left| E\right| }\left| \{x\in \mathbb{R}^{n}:M_{B}\chi _{E}(x)>1/\alpha \}\right| . \] When \(M_{\mathcal{B}}\) satisfies a weak type \((\Phi ,\Phi )\) estimate (for suitable \(\Phi )\), then the basis \(\mathcal{B}\) differentiates functions for which \(\Phi (f)\) is locally integrable. Growth in the halo function (as \(\alpha \rightarrow \infty \)) is connected to weak type bounds on \(M_{\mathcal{B}}\). Here the authors study the related problem of the smoothness of the halo functions. They prove, in particular, that if \(\phi _{\mathcal{B}}\) satisfies the Solyanik estimate \(\phi _{\mathcal{B}}(\alpha )-1\leq C(1-1/\alpha )^{p}\) for \(\alpha >1\), then \(\phi _{\mathcal{B}}\) lies in the Hölder class \(C^{p}(1,\infty )\). This implies that the halo functions of the Hardy-Littlewood maximal operator and the strong maximal operator on \(\mathbb{R}^{n}\) belong to \(C^{1/n}(1,\infty )\). A key part of the proof is to establish certain embedding properties of the halo sets \(\mathcal{H}_{\mathcal{B},\mathcal{\alpha }}(E)=\{x\in \mathbb{R}^{n}:M_{B}\chi _{E}(x)>\alpha \}\).