Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to study the Mergelyan approximation property in and -scales on certain weakly pseudoconvex domains of finite/infinite type in . At the heart of our results lies the solvability of the additive Cousin problem with bounds as well as estimates of the -equation in the corresponding topologies.
1. Introduction
The problem of approximation by holomorphic functions in one or several complex variables has been a central theme in complex analysis and finds it applications in many branches of mathematical physics such as systems identification, signal processing, inverse problems for partial differential equations, and operator theory (cf. [1]).
Holomorphic approximation in one complex variable goes back to Mergelyan [2] who proved that if K is a compact set in the complex plane and its complement in has just one connected component, then every continuous function on K which is holomorphic in the interior of K can be approximated on K by holomorphic functions in a neighborhood of K.
Analogous problems in several complex variables were first investigated independently by Henkin [3], Lieb [4], and Kerzman [5] for strictly pseudoconvex domains with sufficiently smooth boundaries in , and subsequently improved by Fornæss [6] for domains with -smooth boundaries.
In particular, Kerzman [5] proved that if D is a strongly pseudoconvex domain with -boundary in (or in a Stein manifold), , then every holomorphic function in can be approximated on by holomorphic functions on a neighborhood of in the scale of -norm, .
In the -topology, the problem was first handled by Ahern-Schneider [7] and Lieb-Range [8]. Other generalizations can be found in [9].
The key technical tools needed to prove the above results were the existence of a Stein neighborhood basis for and the integral solution operators for with estimates in those topologies.
For weakly pseudoconvex domains, Fornæss and Nagel [10] proved that if D is a smoothly bounded pseudoconvex domain with real analytic boundary, then every function continuous on , holomorphic in D, and can be approximated uniformly on by holomorphic functions on a neighborhood of .
Moreover, Cho proved in [11] that if D is a smoothly bounded pseudoconvex domain of finite type in , then every holomorphic function in the -Sobolev space , , , can be approximated on by holomorphic functions on a neighborhood of in the -norm. In addition, he obtained the same result for the usual Lipschitz space. His key ingredient was the stability of the estimates for in the -setting.
Recently, Kim [12] extended those results obtained in [5] for certain convex ellipsoids of finite/infinite type in . His proof is based on -bounds in the additive Cousin problem via solvability of with -estimates on such domains.
On the other hand, Diederich and Fornæss [13] gave an example of smoothly bounded pseudoconvex domain D in known as “worm domain“ for which the Mergelyan property fails. Their example is based on the presence of a Levi-flat hypersurface in having an annular leaf with infinitesimally nontrivial holonomy.
The main object of this paper is to prove the Mergelyan property on certain class of weakly pseudoconvex domains in , , in different topologies like -topology or -topology on compact subsets, taking for granted the existence of -solving bounded solution operators with estimation in the corresponding norms.
2. Results
Before formulating our first result, we recall from [14] the following definition.
Definition 1.
Let be a weakly pseudoconvex type domain defined by
where ϕ is a real-valued function ϕ on such that
- (a)
- and ;
- (b)
- ; ;
- (c)
- ; ;
- (d)
- there is so that , .
We denote by the Banach space of -forms on with -coefficients. The following -existence theorem for on such domain was proved in [14].
Theorem 1.
Let be given as above and assume that . Let , . Then there exist integral kernels such that the integral is absolutely convergent for almost all and defines linear solution operators to the equation in provided that , where is the Lebesgue measure on . In addition, if , , then for each p there is a constant , independent of f, satisfying the estimates
If f is then also is .
For , define , . Then satisfies all conditions (a)–(d). In this case the domain is of infinite type and satisfying the conditions of Theorem 1 if and only if .
For a bounded domain D in , we denote by the set of all holomorphic functions on D and by the set of continuous functions on D. By we denote the set of all holomorphic functions in , . Finally, denotes the weak-star closure of the algebra of functions that are continuous on and holomorphic in D.
Now we formulate our first result which concerns approximating by functions that are holomorphic in some neighborhood of in -spaces.
Theorem 2.
Let be as in Theorem 1. Then every function in can be approximated in -norm by functions in for all . For , there is a constant , such that every f in can be approximated by a sequence in in -norm, , such that for all . Moreover, if f extends continuously to , then uniformly on .
Remark 1.
It worth remarking that:
- (i)
- This theorem was very recently obtained in [12] for domains in satisfying slightly general conditions than ours.
- (ii)
- A simple example of a pseudoconvex domain for which this result fails is the Hartogs triangle . The holomorphic function on H is bounded by one, and it cannot be approximated in any natural sense by holomorphic functions in neighborhoods of since its restriction to horizontal slices has winding number . Note that is not a Stein compact. One can also see that it fails on the Diederich-Fornæss worm domain [13].
Let D be the complex ellipsoid in
where
Denote by the space of all continuous -forms on D and having continuous derivatives up to on D satisfying Holder condition of order . The corresponding norm is denoted by . The following result has been proved in [15].
Theorem 3.
Let be a complex ellipsoid in defined as above. Let . Then there are linear solution operators such that for every -closed form , . If in addition , , , then there exists a constant such that
This theorem enables us to prove our second result on -holomorphic approximation on complex ellipsoids.
Theorem 4.
Let D be the complex ellipsoid given as in Theorem 3. Then for every function f in , , there is a sequence of functions in such that .
Our approach in the proofs of Theorems 2 and 4 is to cover by finitely many open charts, approximate the function in by a holomorphic function in each of the charts and patch these local approximations into a global one by solving an additive Cousin problem with bounds for locally defined forms or functions via estimates for in the corresponding or settings.
For any two expressions A and B which depending on several parameter, we will use to mean that there is a constant C independent of the parameters under consideration such that . Since the proof of Theorem 4 will be very similar to that of Theorem 2 then we will present a detailed proof for Theorem 2 only.
3. Additive Cousin Problem
In this section we solve the additive Cousin problem with -bounds.
Theorem 5.
Let be as in Theorem 1, let be an open covering of and set . If are Cousin data such that
Then there are functions , , such that
Moreover, there is a finite constant satisfying the estimates
where .
Proof.
Let be a partition of unity subordinate to the covering so that and in a neighborhood of . Since is locally finite, the sum defines a -function on each and by Minkowski’s inequality, we have that
Further, in view of (1) and using , we have that
This together with imply that
By patching together the locally defined smooth -forms we obtain a global smooth -form f on with on for each .
Then, by Theorem 1, there is a function u in such that in and
Set
4. Proof of Theorem 2
The proof follows by using arguments from [16]. Cover by finitely many neighborhoods of boundary points such that for each there is a constant so that if is the inner unit normal to at , then for all and .
For , we set
The family of open sets forms an open cover of provided that is chosen sufficiently small. We then have the following local approximating Lemma.
Lemma 1.
Let , . For define and for . Then we have the following statements:
- (A)
- for ,
- (B)
- pointwise on ,
- (C)
- If or and f is in
Proof.
Statements (A) and (B) follow obviously from the definitions of and . For , Equation (6) follows from the fact that translation defines a continuous operator on -spaces. For , it follows from the uniform continuity of f. □
Unfortunately, those local approximating functions do not match up together to form a global holomorphic function on the closure of D, because
will in general be different from zero if . However, we have
Corollary 1.
Define
and
Then
and in addition, if , we have
Proof.
End Proof of Theorem 2
Choose and so that on a neighborhood W of . For each we choose such that
It is obvious that as . By choosing small enough, we can achieve that
If is sufficiently small, we see moreover that the integral kernels are well-defined for , and so there are -solving linear operators . Since the derivatives of the defining function of are independent of and the volume of is bounded by a constant independent of for , then the -estimates given by Theorem 1 for the operators are independent of for .
Set and apply Theorem 5 to the functions , we get functions such that
and there is a constant , independent of , satisfying the estimate
Hence defines a holomorphic function on so that
Conflicts of Interest
The author declares no conflict of interest.
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