On the fractional logarithmic $p$-Laplacian

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce and investigate the fractional logarithmic $p$-Laplacian $(-Δ)_{p}^{s+\log}$, defined as the first-order derivative with respect to the parameter $t$ of the fractional $p$-Laplacian $(-Δ)_{p}^{t}$ evaluated at $t=s$. We establish that this operator admits the following integral representation \[ \begin{aligned} (-Δ)_{p}^{s+\log} u(x) &= B(N,s,p)(-Δ)_{p}^{s}u(x)\\ &\quad -pC(N,s,p)\mathrm{P.V.}\int_{\mathbb{R}^{N}}\frac{|u(x)-u(y)|^{p-2}(u(x)-u(y))\ln |x-y|}{|x-y|^{N+sp}}dy, \end{aligned} \] where $C(N,s,p)$ denotes the standard normalization constant associated with the fractional $p$-Laplacian, and $B(N,s,p)=\frac{d}{ds}\left(\ln C(N,s,p)\right)$. As a consequence of this representation, it follows that the operator is nonlocal and of logarithmic type, and may be viewed as a nonlinear analogue of the fractional logarithmic Laplace operator recently introduced by Chen et al. \cite{Chen-Chen-Hauer}. We further develop the associated functional framework in both $\mathbb{R}^{N}$ and bounded Lipschitz domains by introducing the natural energy spaces adapted to problems driven by $(-Δ)_{p}^{s+\log}$. Within this framework, fundamental functional inequalities are established, in particular Pohozaev-type identities and D\'ıaz-Saa inequalities, which are of independent interest and applicable to a broader class of problems. Moreover, we derive results concerning density, continuity, and compact embedding properties. We emphasize that the compactness of the embedding is proved at the critical exponent $p^{*}_{s}=\frac{Np}{N-sp}$, which distinguishes the present setting from the classical Sobolev and fractional Sobolev frameworks. Finally, as an application, we investigate the associated Dirichlet eigenvalue problem and derive existence, uniqueness, and boundedness results for the corresponding solutions.