1. Introduction
A weight
u is a non-negative locally integrable function defined on a bounded interval
. We consider subintervals
of
of the form
for
and denote by
the Lebesgue measure of
. A weight
u which satisfies
is called an
Muckenhoupt weight, where
. In [
1], the author proved that if
u is a monotonic weight that satisfies the condition (
1), then there exists
such that
which is the reverse of Hölder’s inequality. In [
2], the authors improved the Muckenhoupt inequality (
2) by establishing the best constant for any weight
u, which is not necessarily monotonic. Their proof was obtained by using the rearrangement
of the function
u over the interval
In particular, they proved that if
u satisfies (
1) with
then
for
A non-negative measurable weight
u is called an
Muckenhoupt weight for
if there exists a constant
, such that the inequality
holds for every subinterval
The smallest constant
satisfying (
1) or (
4) is called the
norm of the weight
u and is denoted by
. For a given fixed constant,
if the weight
then
. In 1972, Muckenhoupt [
1] introduced the full characterizations of
weights in connection with the boundedness of the Hardy and Littlewood maximal operator in the space
. In [
3], the authors proved that if
and satisfies (
4), then
for all
, where the constant
In other words, Muckenhoupt’s result for the
self-improving property states that
such that
and then
The properties of Muckenhoupt class have been deeply investigated, especially in one dimension, and the following aspects have been considered extensively:
Finding the exact value of the limit exponent q for which the self-improving property holds;
Finding the best constants for which the improved condition is satisfied.
Some great work in the problems of finding the exact bounds of exponents for embedding (
6) was achieved in many papers, see for example, [
1,
2,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11]. Since it is impossible to give an exhaustive account of the results related to the problems under consideration, we shall dwell only on some of them, concerned with sharp results for a self-improving property given by Korenovskii [
12]. In particular, Korenovskii found the sharp lower bound of the exponent (
self-improving property), for which (
6) holds and proved that the optimal integrability exponent
q is the positive root of the equation
and also found the explicit value of the constant of the new class. One of the most significant characteristics of the
Muckenhoupt weights is the extrapolation theorem that was announced, and a detailed proof was given, by Rubio de Francia in [
13,
14]. Many results related to this topic have been studied by several authors (see [
15,
16,
17,
18,
19,
20,
21,
22]).
Over the past few years, the interest in the area of discrete harmonic analysis has been renovated and it became an active field of research. This renovated interest began with an observation of M. Riesz in their work on the Hilbert transform in 1928, who proved that the Hilbert discrete operator
is bounded in
spaces if the operator
is bounded in
spaces. In 1952, Alberto Calderón and Antoni Zygmund [
23] extended the results to a more general class of singular integral operators with kernels. It is worth mentioning that the progress in the last years regarding discrete analogues of operators in harmonic analysis is related with Calderón–Zygmund analogues, discrete maximal operators and related problems with number theory, translation invariant fractional integral operators, translation invariant singular Radon transforms, quasi-translation invariant operators, spherical averages and discrete rough maximal functions; we suggest the reader to consider the paper [
24] and the references cited therein.
As performed by Hughes (see [
25] and the references therein), the discrete operators are nicely connected to critical problems in number theory. For example, Waring’s problem, which questions whether each natural number
k is associated with a positive integer
s satisfying that every natural number is the sum of at most
s natural numbers raised to the power
k. This problem has been extended to find the the operator
, which is defined to be the smallest positive integer
s so that every sufficiently large integer (i.e., every integer greater than some constant) can be illustrated as a sum of no more than
s positive integers to the power of
k. Throughout the paper, we assume that
and assume that the discrete weights are positive sequences defined on
where
J is of the form
. The notion
denotes the set of all nonincreasing and non-negative sequences of
X. The discrete weight
v is said to be in the discrete Muckenhoupt
class for
, if there exists a constant
satisfying the inequality
The discrete
v is said to be in the discrete Ariňo and Muckenhoupt
class for
, if there exists a constant
such that the inequality
The necessary and sufficient conditions for the boundedness of a series of discrete classical operators (Hardy–Littlewood maximal operator, Hardy’s operator) in the weighted spaces
are the
Muckenhoupt condition,
condition on the weight
v. In [
26], the authors proved that the discrete Hardy–Littlewood maximal operator
which is defined by
is bounded on
for
if and only if
In [
27], Heing and Kufner proved that the Hardy operator
which is defined by
is bounded in
for
if and only if
and
for some constant
and
. In [
28], Bennett and Gross-Erdmann improved the result of Heing and Kufner by excluding the conditions on
v. In [
29], the authors proved that the discrete Hardy operator is bounded in
for
if and only if
The discrete weight
v is said to be belong to the discrete Muckenhoupt
class if there exists a constant
such that the inequality
or equivalently
holds for all
. In [
29], the authors proved the self-improving property of the weighted discrete Muckenhoupt classes. They established also the exact values of the limit exponents as well as new constants of the new classes. These values correspond to the sharp values of the continuous case that has been obtained by Nikolidakis (see [
7,
8]). For more details of discrete results, we refer the reader to the papers [
30,
31,
32,
33,
34].
In [
28], the authors marked that the study of discrete inequalities is not a simple mission, and it is in fact more complicated to analyze than its integral counterparts. They discovered that the conditions do not coincide, in any natural way, with those that are obtained by discretization of the results of functions but the reverse is true. In other words, the results satisfied for sums holds, with the obvious modifications, for integrals which in fact proved the first part of basic principle of Hardy, Littlewood and Polya [
35]. Obviously the proofs in the discrete form are transferred instantly and much more simpler, when applied to integrals.
The natural questions which arise now are as follows:
(). Is it possible to find a new approach to unify the proofs of the self-improving properties of continuous and discrete Muckenhoupt weights?
(). Is it possible to prove the self-improving properties of Ariňo and Muckenhoupt weights?
Our aim in this paper is to give an answer to the first question on time scales, which has received much attention and become a major field in pure and applied mathematics today. The second question will be considered later.
The general idea on time scales is to prove a result for dynamic inequality or dynamic equation, where the domain of the unknown function is a so-called time scale
, which is an arbitrary nonempty closed subset of the real numbers
. This idea has been created by Hilger [
36] to unify the study of the continuous and the discrete results. He started the study of dynamic equations on time scales. The three most popular examples of calculus on time scales are differential calculus, difference calculus and quantum calculus, i.e., when
,
,
, for
and
where
. The cases when the time scale is equal to the reals or to the integers represent the classical theories of integral and of discrete inequalities. In more precise terms, we can say that the study of dynamic inequalities or dynamic equations on time scales helps avoid proving results twice—once for differential inequality and once again for difference inequality. For more details we refer to the books [
37,
38] and the references they have cited. Very recently, the authors in [
39,
40,
41,
42,
43] proved the time scale versions of the Muckenhoupt and Gehring inequalities and used them to prove some higher integrability results on time scales. This also motivated us to develop a new technique on time scales to prove some new results of inequalities with weights and use the new inequalities to formulate some conditions for the boundedness of the Hardy operator with negative powers on time scales and show the applications of the obtained results.
The paper is organized as follows: In
Section 2, we prove some Hardy’s type inequalities and new refinements of these inequalities with negative powers. In
Section 3, we will employ some of these inequalities to prove the self-improving properties of the Muckenhoupt class on a time scale
for non-negative and nondecreasing weights. The main results give a solution on time scales of the problem of finding the exact value of the limit exponent
, for which the self-improving property holds and also for the problem of finding the best constants
for which the improved
condition satisfies
and
above.
2. Hardy’s Type Inequalities with Negative Powers
In this section, we prove some Hardy’s type inequalities and the new refinements of these inequalities with negative powers. First, we recall the following concepts related to the notions of time scales and for more details, we refer to the two books [
44,
45] which summarize and organize much of the time scale calculus. A function
f is called right-dense continuous (rd-continuous) if
f is continuous at left-dense points and right dense-points in
, and left-side limits exist and are finite. The set
denotes the set of all rd-continuous functions
f. The derivative of the product
and the quotient
of two differentiable functions
f and
g are given by
where
is the forward jump operator on a time scale. Let
be continuously differentiable and suppose that
is delta differentiable. Then
is delta differentiable and the two chain rules that we will use in this paper are given in the next two formulas.
and
A special case of (
11) is
In this paper, we will refer to the (delta) integral which, we can define as follows: If
, then the Cauchy (delta) integral of
g is defined by
If
then the Cauchy integral
exists,
, and satisfies
. An infinite integral is defined as
The integration on discrete time scales is defined by
The integration by parts formula on time scale is given by
The Hölder inequality on the time scale is given by
where
,
and
. The inequality (
14) is reversed for
In the following, we will assume that
and
Throughout this paper, we will assume that the functions in the statements of the theorems are rd-continuous functions and the integrals considered are assumed to exist and be finite. In addition, in our proofs, we will use the convention
and
Throughout the paper, we assume that
and
is a fixed finite interval from
. We define the time scale interval
by
. A weight
defined on
is a
integrable function of non-negative real numbers. We consider the norm on
of the form
A non-negative
integrable function
belongs to the Muckenhoupt class
on the fixed interval
if there exists a constant
such that the inequality
holds for every subinterval
. A non-negative
integrable function
belongs to the Muckenhoupt class
for
if there exists a constant
such that the inequality
holds for every subinterval
. For a given exponent
, we define the
-norm of A non-negative
integrable weight
by the following quantity:
where the supremum is taken over all intervals
. Note that by Hölder’s inequality
for all
, and the following inclusion is true:
For any function
which is non-negative, we define the operator
by
From the definition of
, we see that if
f is nondecreasing, then
Additionally, we have determined by using the above inequality that
Furthermore, if
f is nonincreasing, we have that
and
From these facts, we have the following properties of
Lemma 1. - (i).
If f is nondecreasing, then
- (ii).
If f is nondecreasing, then so is .
Lemma 2. - (i).
If f is nonincreasing, then
- (ii).
If f is nonincreasing, then so is .
Remark 1. As a consequence of Lemma 1, we notice that if f is non-negative, and nondecreasing, then . We also notice from Lemma 1 that if f is non-negative, and nondecreasing, then is also non-negative and nondecreasing for
Remark 2. As a consequence of Lemma 2, we notice that if f is non-negative, and nonincreasing, then . We also notice from Lemma 2 that if f is non-negative, and nonincreasing, then is also non-negative and nonincreasing for
In what follows, we will define
and
where
is the forward jump operator, by
and
Theorem 1. Assume that f is non-negative and nondecreasing on . If thenfor any . Proof. First, we consider the case when
and prove that
For brevity, we write
By employing the integration by parts (
13), with
and
, we obtain
By the chain rule (
12), we see that
Substituting the last inequality into (
20), we obtain
Moreover, since
the product rule gives
Substituting (
22) into (
21), we obtain
By combining like terms, we obtain
which proves the inequality (
18) when
Now, consider the case when
and fix
. Then by applying Hölder’s inequality (
14) with
and
, we obtain
which is the desired inequality (
18). The proof is complete. □
Theorem 2. Assume that f is non-negative and nondecreasing on . If then Proof. From the elementary inequality (see Elliott [
46]),
for every
and
, we deduce by using
where
that
Now, by defining
we obtain
and then
By using these values in (
25), we have
By integrating (
26) from 0 to
we obtain
Now, by applying Theorem 1 on the term
we obtain
Comparing (
27) and (
28), we have
By combining like terms in the last inequality, we conclude that
which is the desired inequality (
18). The proof is complete. □
Theorem 3. Assume that f is non-negative and nondecreasing on If then Proof. By applying Hölder’s inequality (
14) with
and
on the left-hand side of (
31), we obtain
Now, by replacing
r with
in (
30), we obtain
By combining (
32) and (
33), we see that
which is the desired inequality (
31). The proof is complete. □
Theorem 4. Assume that f is non-negative and nondecreasing on If then Proof. We proceed as in the proof of Theorem 1 (without removing the term
) to obtain
By combining like terms, we obtain
If we fix
then by applying Hölder’s inequality with
and
, we obtain
Now, in order to complete the proof, we shall utilize the inequality
which is a variant of the well-known Bernoulli inequality. This inequality is valid for all
and
or
and
and equality holds if only if
Now, by employing (
37) with
and noting that
we obtain
Substituting the last inequality into (
36), we obtain
which is the desired inequality (
34). The proof is complete. □
Theorem 5. Assume that f is non-negative and nondecreasing on . If then Proof. We proceed as in the proof of Theorem 2, so we have from (
27) that
By applying Theorem 4, we obtain
and then
By combining like terms, we obtain
which is the desired inequality (
38). The proof is complete. □
Theorem 6. Assume that f is non-negative and nondecreasing on . If then Proof. By applying Hölder’s inequality with
and
on the left hand side of (
40), we obtain
Now, by replacing
r with
in (
39), we obtain
By combining (
41) and (
42), we obtain
Now, by employing (
37), with
we obtain
Substituting the last inequality into (
43), we obtain
which is the desired inequality (
40). The proof is complete. □
Theorem 7. Assume that ω is non-negative and nondecreasing and Then we have for every thatfor any Proof. Let
. Since
, it follows that
Moreover, utilizing the well-known product rule
for
and
we have that
and for
and
we have that
By comparing (
46) and (
47) with (
45), we obtain
On the other hand, since
is nonincreasing, then so is
, or equivalently,
, then we have
Consequently, yet another application of the product rule, with
and
yields that
by substituting the last equation in (
49), we have
Now, taking into account relations (
48) and (
50), we have that
Finally, integrating the last inequality from 0 to
and dividing by
, we obtain
The proof is complete. □