Characterizations of compactness and weighted eigenvalue problem associated with fractional Hardy-type inequalities

TL;DR

This paper characterizes the compactness of weighted embeddings and studies weighted eigenvalue problems related to fractional Hardy inequalities, using Banach space techniques and concentration compactness arguments.

Contribution

It provides new characterizations of compactness for weighted fractional Sobolev embeddings and analyzes the spectral properties of associated weighted fractional p-Laplacian operators.

Findings

Characterization of compactness via Banach space closure.

Equivalence of compactness to weight function belonging to a specific closure.

Existence and properties of weighted eigenvalues for fractional p-Laplacian.

Abstract

In this article, we consider the following fractional {Hardy-type} inequality: \begin{align} \label{Fractional Hardy_abst} \int_{\mathbb{R}^N} |w(x)||u(x)|^p \mathrm{d}x \leq C \int_{\mathbb{R}^N \times \mathbb{R}^N} \frac{|u(x)-u(y)|^p}{|x-y|^{N+sp}} \mathrm{d}x\mathrm{d}y:= \|u\|_{s,p}^p\,, \ \forall u \in \mathcal{D}^{s,p}(\mathbb{R}^N), \end{align} where $0<s<1<p<\frac{N}{s}$, and $\mathcal{D}^{s,p}(\mathbb{R}^N)$ is the completion of $C_c^1(\mathbb{R}^N)$ with respect to the {norm} $\|\cdot\|_{s,p}$. We denote the space of admissible {weight function} $w$ in \eqref{Fractional Hardy_abst} by $\mathcal{H}_{s,p}(\mathbb{R}^N)$. Maz'ya-type characterization helps us to define a Banach function norm on $\mathcal{H}_{s,p}(\mathbb{R}^N)$. Using the Banach function space structure and the concentration compactness type arguments, we provide several characterizations for the compactness of the map ${W}(u)= \int_{{\mathbb{R}^N}} |w| |u|^p \mathrm{d}x$ on $\mathcal{D}^{s,p}(\mathbb{R}^N)$. In particular, we prove that ${W}$ is compact on $\mathcal{D}^{s,p}(\mathbb{R}^N)$ if and only if $w \in \mathcal{H}_{s,p,0}(\mathbb{R}^N):=\overline{C_c(\mathbb{R}^N)} \ \mbox{in} \ \mathcal{H}_{s,p}(\mathbb{R}^N)$. Further, we study the following {weighted} eigenvalue problem: \begin{equation*} (-\Delta_{p})^{s}u = \lambda w(x) |u|^{p-2}u ~~\text{in}~\mathbb{R}^{N}, \end{equation*} where $(-\Delta_{p})^{s}$ is the fractional $p$-Laplace operator and $w = w_{1} - w_{2}~\text{with}~ w_{1},w_{2} \geq 0,$ is such that $ w_{1} \in \mathcal{H}_{s,p,0}(\mathbb{R}^N)$ and $w_{2} \in L^{1}_{loc}(\mathbb{R}^N)$.