Fractional Heat Semigroup Characterization of Distances from Functions in Lipschitz Spaces to Their Subspaces

Abstract

Let $Λ_s$ denote the inhomogeneous Lipschitz space of order $s\in(0,\infty)$ on $\mathbb{R}^n$. This article characterizes the distance $d(f, V)_{Λ_s}: = \inf_{g\in V} \|f-g\|_{Λ_s}$ from a function $f\in Λ_s$ to a non-dense subspace $V\subset Λ_s$ via the fractional semigroup $\{T_{α, t}: =e^{-t (-Δ)^{α/2}}: t\in (0, \infty)\}$ for any $α\in(0,\infty)$. Given an integer $ r >s/α$, a uniformly bounded continuous function $f$ on $\mathbb{R}^n$ belongs to the space $Λ_s$ if and only if there exists a constant $λ\in(0,\infty)$ such that \begin{align*} \left|(-Δ)^{\frac {αr}2} (T_{α, t^α} f)(x) \right|\leq λt^{s -rα}\ \ \text{for any $x\in\mathbb{R}^n$ and $t\in (0, 1]$}.\end{align*} The least such constant is denoted by $λ_{ α, r, s}(f)$. For each $f\in Λ_s$ and $0<\varepsilon< λ_{α,r, s}(f)$, let $$ D_{α, r}(s,f,\varepsilon):=\left\{ (x,t)\in \mathbb{R}^n\times (0,1]:\ \left| (-Δ)^{\frac {αr}2} (T_{α, t^α} f)(x) \right|> \varepsilon t^{s -r α}\right\}$$ be the set of ``bad'' points. To quantify its size, we introduce a class of extended nonnegative \emph{admissible set functions} $ν$ on the Borel $σ$-algebra $\mathcal{B}(\mathbb{R}^n\times [0, 1])$ and define, for any admissible function $ν$, the \emph{critical index} $ \varepsilon_{α, r, s,ν}(f):=\inf\{\varepsilon\in(0,\infty):\ ν(D_{α, r}(s,f,\varepsilon))<\infty\}.$ Our result shows that, for a broad class of subspaces $V\subset Λ_s$, including intersections of $Λ_s$ with Sobolev, Besov, Triebel--Lizorkin, and Besov-type spaces, there exists an admissible function $ν$ depending on $V$ such that $\varepsilon_{α, r, s,ν}(f)\sim \mathrm{dist}(f, V)_{Λ_s}.$