Sharp Hardy Identities and Inequalities on Carnot Groups

Abstract In this paper we establish general weighted Hardy identities for several subelliptic settings including Hardy identities on the Heisenberg group, Carnot groups with respect to a homogeneous gauge and Carnot–Carathéodory metric, general nilpotent groups, and certain families of Hörmander vector fields. We also introduce new weighted uncertainty principles in these settings. This is done by continuing the program initiated by [N. Lam, G. Lu and L. Zhang, Factorizations and Hardy’s-type identities and inequalities on upper half spaces, Calc. Var. Partial Differential Equations 58 2019, 6, Paper No. 183; N. Lam, G. Lu and L. Zhang, Geometric Hardy’s inequalities with general distance functions, J. Funct. Anal. 279 2020, 8, Article ID 108673] of using the Bessel pairs introduced by [N. Ghoussoub and A. Moradifam, Functional Inequalities: New Perspectives and New Applications, Math. Surveys Monogr. 187, American Mathematical Society, Providence, 2013] to obtain Hardy identities. Using these identities, we are able to improve significantly existing Hardy inequalities in the literature in the aforementioned subelliptic settings. In particular, we establish the Hardy identities and inequalities in the spirit of [H. Brezis and J. L. Vázquez, Blow-up solutions of some nonlinear elliptic problems, Rev. Mat. Univ. Complut. Madrid 10 1997, 443–469] and [H. Brezis and M. Marcus, Hardy’s inequalities revisited. Dedicated to Ennio De Giorgi, Ann. Sc. Norm. Super. Pisa Cl. Sci. (4) 25 1997, 1–2, 217–237] in these settings.