The Hessian Sobolev inequality and its extensions

Abstract

The Hessian Sobolev inequality of X.-J. Wang, and the Hessian Poincar\'e inequalities of Trudinger and Wang are fundamental to differential and conformal geometry, and geometric PDE. These remarkable inequalities were originally established via gradient flow methods. In this paper, direct elliptic proofs are given, and extensions to trace inequalities with general measures in place of Lebesgue measure are obtained. The new techniques rely on global estimates of solutions to Hessian equations in terms of Wolff's potentials, and duality arguments making use of a non-commutative inner product on the cone of k-convex functions.