Journal of Function Spaces

1. Introduction

In the early 1950s, Lorentz introduced the now famous Lorentz spaces in his papers [1, 2] as a generalization of the spaces. The parameters and encode the information about the size of a function; that is, how tall and how spread out a function is. The Lorentz spaces are quasi-Banach spaces in general, but the Lorentz quasi-norm of a function has better control over the size of the function than the norm, via the parameters and , making the spaces very useful. We are mostly concerned with studying the multiplication and composition operators on Lorentz spaces. These have been studied before by various authors in particular by Arora et al. in [3–6]. In this paper, the results we obtain are in accordance with what these authors have found before. We believe that the techniques and relative simplicity of our approach are worth reporting to further enrich the topic. Our results, found on the boundary of the unit disc due to the original focus by De Souza in [7], will show how one can use the atomic characterization of the Lorentz space in the study of multiplication and composition operators in the spaces .

2. Preliminaries

Let be a measure space.

Definition 2.1. Let be a complex-valued function defined on . The decreasing rearrangement of is the function defined on by where is the distribution of the function .

Definition 2.2. Given a measurable function on and , define The set of all functions with is called the Lorentz space with indices and and denoted by .

We now consider the measure on to be finite. Let be a -measurable function such that for a -measurable set and for an absolute constant . Here refers to the preimage of the set .

Remark 2.3. It is important to note that is not necessarily a norm.

Definition 2.4. For a given function , we define the multiplication operator on Lorentz spaces as and the composition operator as .
The following two results are used in our proofs. The first is a result of De Souza [7] which gives an atomic decomposition of . The second is the Marcinkiewicz interpolation theorem (see [8]) which we state for completeness of presentation.

Theorem 2.5 (see De Souza [7]). A function for if and only if with , whereas is measure on and are -measurable sets in . Moreover, , where the infimum is taken over all possible representations of .

Theorem 2.6 (see Marcinkiewicz). Assume that for , for all , for all measurable subsets of , there are some constants such that for a linear or quasi-linear operator (a). (b).
Then there is some such that for .

One implication of Theorem 2.5 is that it can be used to prove and justify a theorem of Stein and Weiss [9]. That is, to show that linear operators are bounded, where is Banach space closed under absolute value and satisfying , all one needs to show is that . Theorem 2.6 will be used to show that valid results on are also valid on .

Definition 2.7. We denote by the set of real-valued functions defined on such that where .

We will show that the space is equivalent to a weak space for some that depends on and and is quasinorm.

Lemma 2.8. a quasinorm on .

Proof. by definition. This implies that . Moreover, implies that for all  ≤ . Hence, we have , thus, since is a representative of an equivalence class. Now let be a real constant, , and . Noting , the homogeneity condition follows trivially. Let . Since () ≤   + , for any , we have Since for , we have

Theorem 2.9. , where .

Proof. Suppose . There is an absolute constant such that for all , Thus, implying that .
Conversely, let . Then there is an absolute constant such that, . This implies that . Thus, This implies that .

Remark 2.10. One can easily see from Theorem 2.9 that and . Moreover, . To see this, note that for all since is decreasing. Taking the limit as , we see that .

3. Main Results

3.1. Multiplication Operators

Theorem 3.1 (see multiplication operator on ). The multiplication operator for is bounded if and only . Moreover, .

Proof. It is convenient to use which is equivalent to . Assume that . Then for where , Multiplying and dividing the integrand on the left by , we get Since is decreasing on and , we have Taking the supremum over all , we have that .
Assume that and . Since we have And so, Using the atomic decomposition of , we get
To prove the second part of the theorem, first note that the expression in (3.5) gives that . Now take . We can easily see that and for since is decreasing. Now taking the over and the limit as gives . Thus, .

The following theorem, which is equivalent to Theorem 1.1 of [6], follows from Theorems 2.6 and 3.1.

Theorem 3.2 (see multiplication operator on ). The multiplication operator is bounded if and only if for . Moreover, .

Remark 3.3. Since, by Theorem 2.9, for , the theorem implies that if the multiplication operator defined by is bounded, then for .

Remark 3.4. It is worth observing that the norm can also be used to prove the previous theorem, first on and then on by means of either the Marcienkiewiecz Inteporlation Theorem or Theorem 2.5. Actually, this norm was the original motivation for the introduction of the space . For sake of simplicity and without loss of generality, we modified it by replacing , by .

Theorem 3.5. If , and , where , then where  =  and .

Proof. Given , assume and . Let be such that and . Since , we have Using Holder’s inequality on the RHS with , we have Thus, we have

Theorem 3.6. If , then is bounded, where and for and .

Proof. Let Therefore, That is,

Noting that , , it is easy to see that Theorem 3.6 shows that the result of Theorem 3.5 extends to the case where .

3.2. Composition Operators

Theorem 3.7. The composition operator is bounded if and only if there is an absolute constant C such that for all -measurable sets and for . Moreover, .

Proof. We will prove this theorem for and use the interpolation theorem to conclude for .
First assume that is bounded that is, there is an absolute constant such that Let be a -measurable set in and let . Then, (3.15) is equivalent to that is, Since , then . Therefore, the previous inequality gives And hence,
On the other hand, assume that there is some constant such that . Then, Consequently, As a consequence of Theorem 2.5 or the result by Weiss and Stein in [9], we have
To prove the second part of the theorem, note that from the above, we have But . Thus, . To obtain the other inequality, let . This gives and Thus, Now to show the result for , note that the operator is linear on and that for and such that , we have and . Since , then for some absolute constants and we have
Hence, by the interpolation theorem we conclude that there is a constant such that

Remark 3.8. The necessary and sufficient condition (3.14) makes intuitive sense if we consider a variety of measures. Let us consider two of them. (1)If is the Lebesgue measure and happens to be an interval, then it suffices to take as the left multiplication by an absolute constant to achieve (3.14).(2)If instead is the Haar measure, by taking , the locally compact topological group of nonzero real numbers with multiplication as operation, then for any Borel set , we have . Hence (3.14) is achieved for a measurable function such that . The left multiplication by the reciprocal of an absolute constant would be enough.

Remark 3.9. The results in Theorems 3.6 and 3.7 are in accordance with the results of Arora et al. in [5, 6]. In fact, even though they obtained their results in a more general version of Lorentz spaces, their necessary and sufficient conditions for boundedness of the multiplication and composition operators are the same as ours.

4. Discussion

The space , seems to be underutilized in analysis despite the fact that in the 1950s Stein and Weiss [9] showed that for a sublinear operator and a Banach space if , then ; that is, can be extended to the whole . De Souza [7] showed that the reason for this is the nature of in that if and only if with . This “atomic decomposition of ” provides us with a technique to study operators on and in particular . In other words, to study operators on , all we need is to study the actions of the operator on characteristic functions which can then be lifted to through the use of interpolation theorems. Although we only considered multiplication and composition operators, other operators (Hardy-Littlewood maximal, Carleson maximal, Hankel, etc.) can be studies likewise.

To conclude, the goal of the present paper is to show that a simple atomic decomposition of spaces shows the boundedness of operators on straightforward. In fact, we showed that unlike other techniques in the literature, the boundedness of these operators on characteristic functions is enough to generalize to the whole Lorentz space. This technique is not new at all, since it was first used by Stein and Weiss in [9] to extend the Marcinkiewicz interpolation theorem. The broader question is if the the same technique can be extended to Lorentz-Bochner spaces and even Lorentz-martingale spaces. If answered positively, the technique proposed in our paper will contrast the ones by Yong et al. in [10], which we believe are not as straightforward as ours. It has been shown in the literature that operators such as the centered Hardy operator, the Hilbert operator (under condition) are all bounded on Lorentz spaces. Usually the proofs of these facts are not trivial, so by first finding an atomic decomposition on Lorentz spaces , it would be easier to get another proof of the boundedness of these operators, without having to resort to the Bennett and Sharpley inequality in [11]. It is important to note that, atomic decomposition on general Banach spaces has been found in [12], under the same line of research as ours. Because characteristic functions are easy to manipulate, an even broader question would be to find the class of Banach spaces whose atomic decomposition can be expressed in terms of characteristic functions only.