Characterizations and boundary regularity of continuous preservers of Carleson interpolating sequences

Abstract

We characterize the continuous mappings of the unit disk that preserve every Carleson interpolating sequence. Preservation in one direction is equivalent to being a disk homeomorphism whose inverse is uniformly continuous in the pseudohyperbolic metric and whose associated weighted pushforward is bounded on positive Carleson measures. Preservation in both directions is equivalent to being a disk homeomorphism that, together with its inverse, is uniformly continuous in that metric and has a strongly quasisymmetric boundary extension. Within this class, comparability of the boundary defects is equivalent to a bi-Lipschitz boundary map. Building on the canonical factorization established in our earlier work, we give explicit criteria for membership in the continuous boundary kernel. For a homeomorphism of the closed disk with identity boundary values and a uniform boundary expansion of first order, kernel membership is equivalent to positivity of the determinant of the real boundary differential, or equivalently of the inward normal derivative of the boundary defect. No differentiability in the interior is required. The $C^1$ criterion on the closed disk follows as a corollary, while a counterexample shows that pointwise boundary differentiability does not suffice. We also characterize factorizations with a quasiconformal kernel and record the exact maximal dilatation of its radial factor.